weblog.masukomi.org - misc

Touchability Graphic

2026-05-31T00:00:00-04:00

Table of Contents

Overview

The “Touch Meme” has been floating around the internet for a while, and it’s difficult - if not impossible - to find its origin. Over time the graphic has become degraded with JPEG artifacts.

However, it’s proven a useful tool within the autism community for conveying where we’re comfortable being touched and by who.

In order for people to have a nice clean starting point, I’ve recreated the graphic, with a few changes, and made it available in vector and rasterized formats. I’ve also created a version of the person pre-divided into sections so that you only need to use a “Paint Bucket” tool to fill in the parts with the colors appropriate for you.

Example

We each have very specific feelings about what parts of our body we’re ok with being touched by different groups of people. For example, I don’t want strangers touching me at all but because our society demands it, I’m “Ehh” about shaking hands with acquaintances, and have learned to deal with the fact that touchy people may touch my arms. I’m fine with lovers touching my groin, but it’s a “hell no” from everyone else.

Think about how you feel about each of these groups touching various parts of your body, and fill in the various body parts to represent how you feel about it.

Here’s a quick side-by-side of the blank template, and how I chose to fill it out.

Templates

Blank template images

Download any of these to modify or fill in as you see fit. Note that the font used is “Marker Felt”

JPEG Format ← If you’re not sure, download this one.
SVG Format
Affinity Designer Format

Pre-divided little person

So that you can easily fill it the appropriate sections with the Paint Bucket tool. The colors are intended to be replaced with the ones that are appropriate for you. Fill them in then, copy-paste the colored person into the larger template so that folks can see what the colors mean and what group of people they apply to.

Versions of the person

The Memory Of Media

2026-05-30T00:00:00-04:00

Table of Contents

Overview
All Answers Are Misleading
Favorite Media
- Movies
- Books
- Music
  - Albums
  - Songs
- Art

Overview

Someone asked me about some of my favorite media, and I started to compile a list in my head, but then I realized two things:

any answer I give will be misleading.
explaining why is an excellent opportunity to shine a light on what it’s like to have Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory.

All Answers Are Misleading

Picking favorite media, is at some level a matter of making subjective qualitative judgements about media you’ve consumed. You might immediately think of two or three movies you really enjoyed and compare memories of them in your head. I can’t do that. Movies are one of the things I remember best, but even with movies I’ve seen again and again it’s just a collection of frozen moments and an emotion.

When describing SDAM memory recall Sassy Smith said

The visual detail might be missing, the narrative thread might be gone, and the sense of who was there, what unfolded, what someone said, all of that might be inaccessible. Yet the emotion tied to that event, or the body sensation connected to it, might be present.

…Some of that is probably my own experience shaping the lens. I have aphantasia, SDAM and alexithymia, so the idea of re-experiencing an emotion from a past memory is genuinely foreign to me. I don’t step back into the moment. I don’t re-feel what I felt then, and when I’ve spoken with others who share similar experiences, that’s largely what I’ve heard reflected back.

My experience is very similar to hers, when I try and recall media I enjoyed, it’s mostly just an emotion, and one or two blurry frozen moments. I can tell you I loved Ender’s Game (the book) and that it hit me hard. I can’t tell you why. I remember the pivotal moment just before the end. I know that it was only as impactful as it was because of what came before it, but what came before it? I’m not sure. I know there was physical and mental training. I remember that Ender’s brother is a twisted man. I remember he had a sister who wasn’t. That’s it.

When I’m making a list of favorite media I’m comparing little balls of emotion. I’m picking things that effected me strongly at whatever point in my life I encountered them. Would they effect me similarly today? Probably not, because I’m a different person now, but I can’t bring back the memory of the thing to consider through more experienced eyes. I can only say “this movie evoked strong emotion”

Before I move on, I should mention one curious twist of SDAM as it plays out in my head. Looking back, a movie may just be an emotion and a sense of like or dislike, but re-watching that movie is different. Sometimes, the act of watching it is a series of specific pointers that trigger more normal memories: obscure facts about the actors, a future event in the film, a weird thing I noticed in the background in the scene they’re about to switch to. It depends on the film, and / or how many times I’ve seen it.

Favorite Media

As mentioned above, my memory of most of these is just a small detached emotion. Because of that, it’s not possible for me to rank any of these. They’re just things I consumed that effected me meaningfully. The lists are also inherently limited by what I can recall at the moment.

The thing you need to understand about the descriptions I’ve added by each: it is - in most cases - all I have. That’s the entire memory of the thing; that plus a little sense of emotion.

Movies

You would think that watching a movie many times would cause me to recall it better, but that’s not really the case. I’ve seen Batman (the Tim Burton, and Michael Keaton one) maybe hundreds of times when I was a teen. It was literally the only movie I owned. At one point I had the entire script memorized. Now? I remember almost none of it.

The Incredibles I’ve watched it at least ten times. There’s something wholesome about this. Something about family.
Beyond Rangoon This movie hit me hard in 1995. All I remember is that it’s about a white woman stumbling into political bullshit in Burma, and how badly it effects people.
Léon: The Professional I remember flashes of the first five minutes or so, a couple moments later in the film, and that it hit me hard.
The Big Blue I remember that it was about a competitive free diver who’d been hired for something. I remember that it left me unmoving, and unable to speak for a long time afterwards.
The Fifth Element I adore this film, but the “I love you” bit at the end is cheap, and unearned, and completely undermines it. Unlike most films, I remember entire scenes from this. I have watched it many, many times.
The City of Lost Children Weird in wonderful ways. Touching. Darkly funny. “Je suis l’original!” Trained fleas. A gentle giant. A little girl seeking her brother. A scientist trying to dream. A green mist. Trained fleas with a dark secret.
Amélie Gods what a wonderful film: quirky, silly, intriguing, mischievous, kind. I can remember most of the characters, and many of the moments.
Hackers It’s… a thing. Ridiculousness, seriousness, and naivete all mashed together in all the best ways. I’m not sure how much of my love of this movie is nostalgia and how much is the movie itself. I remember many scenes of this.
The Nightmare Before Christmas In no small part because I love Danny Elfman’s music. I remember many moments from this, and have seen it many times.

Books

Ender’s Game An emotional gut punch. A twisted brother. A sister who was good, but I’m not sure why. An incredible twist. Yes, I’m aware the author is very problematic, but unlike JKR he’s not using the sales of his creations to fund a genocide.
The Harmony of Falling Snow This book is my cozy place. I’ve read it maybe four times in the past year. I remember more of it than most any other media at the moment. Partially because I keep reading it. Partially because our world sucks, and I so desperately want to escape to theirs.
The Magic And The Healing I’ve read this many times, although it may have been a decade since I last did. I remember many moments from it, but not how the moments connect to each other. Like The Harmony of Falling Snow, it’s a world I wanted to escape to. I think it would be more meaningful to the me of my 20s than the me of my 50s, but it’s still an excellent book. I remember that it’s sequel was ok, but not as good.
The Summer Tree I think I was still a teen when I read this. I remember thinking that this was so much more deserving of love and adoration than The Hobbit. This was the fantasy series people should have been making movies of. Now, I don’t remember much. I remember a man sacrificing himself on a tree in some way that went beyond the flesh. I remember a cliff. A long ride on horseback. Characters that were a thousand times more fleshed out and meaningful than anything Tolkien wrote.
Catnip This is light popcorn fare, without the emotional impact of the others on this list, but I keep coming back to it. A little bit because it’s a polyamorous trans story. A little bit because it’s just cozy and hopeful. The audiobook is really good too.

Music

Music is… difficult for me to recommend. My relationship to it is very autistic, and for a while I was working very hard to be a professional studio musician. I relate to it, and use it in different ways. I’ll take a song and put it on repeat for a month on two as I work on a project. I couldn’t play a song from memory, but the moment any of the songs / albums below start playing I know exactly where it’s going.

Albums

I’ve listened to all of these hundreds, of times.

Zap Mamma: Adventures in Afropea 1 There never was a 2, and I think the band broke up leaving only one person to continue making music under this name afterwards. The other albums aren’t terrible, but they aren’t even remotely the same, or as good.
Bad Brains: I against I Much more mainstream, and less punk than their other albums.
Pop Will Eat Itself: Cure For Sanity So many good songs on this album: “X, Y, & Zee”, “92° F (The 3rd Degree)”, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” Everything on this album is burned into my synapses.
Orbital: Orbital 2 I still remember “Halcyon + On + On” playing over the intro to Hackers.
Ani Difranco: Ani Difranco I like all of her stuff, but this is the album I listened to the most. Like her, I’m not as frustrated and angry as I was when this album came out. But it’s still an incredible album.
The Suitcase Junket: Dying Star Saw him doing his one-man-band thing on the side of the road during a town festival in Cambridge MA. Bought two CDs on the spot. This was one of them.
The Dave Brubek Quartet: Time Out Recorded in 1959 and still as amazing as ever. “Take Five” is - of course - my favorite.
Metallica: Master of Puppets I rarely listen to Metallica anymore, but this album has a special place in my heart. At one point I knew it so well that I could isolate the instruments in my head and listen to any one of them individually in my head.

Recent additions, not so firmly entrenched in my brain.

Sofi Tukker: Soft Animals I like a lot of their stuff, but this is the album I’ve listened to the most.

Songs

Estelle: American Boy Without exaggeration, I’ve listened to this thousands of times.
WING: Dopamine
Hiss, WING: Object
Jain: Makeba
The Dead South: In Hell I’ll Be In Good Company
Childish Gambino: This is America Not because I listen to it often, or because I particularly love it, but because I think it and its accompanying video are more relevant with every passing day.

Art

Auguste Rodin No sculpture has ever moved me like his can.
Pablo Picasso A master of the line, but also someone I have a personal connection to.
Ansel Adams How can you not love what he saw?
Robert Mapelthorpe Some of his stuff I don’t care about. Some hit me hard when I first encountered it.
Pierre-August Renoir I don’t want a picture of his hanging on my wall, but there’s something beautiful about his work.
Nancy Angell / Angell-Rickenbacker My mom. Incredibly talented. Sadly unknown, despite having a few pieces in museums.

Yes, We Cook For Our Dogs

2026-05-02T00:00:00-04:00

Table of Contents

Overview

We cook for our dogs. Not because of any nutritional ideology, or because we think our dogs are too good for kibble. No, we cook for them because we didn’t have any other option, and once we saw the effect, we couldn’t morally stop.

Why We Do It

That’s Ben. Ben was a Springer-Spaniel Border Collie mix. He’d been through some traumatizing stuff before Wifey got him, but with enough years of love and affection, he grew into a sweet lovable semi-neurotic doofus. He also grew old. Eventually, food stopped being interesting to him. We tried everything we could get our hands on. Cheap filler laden crap. Stupidly expensive freeze-dried organic whatever. At best we’d get two days worth of interest from him, and then he’d go back to not eating.

But then Wifey found Feed Your Best Friend Better: Easy, Nutritious Meals and Treats for Dogs

Everything changed after that. He was interested in food again. Admittedly, sometimes Wifey would have to hand-feed him to convince him to keep eating, but he would keep eating. Once he started eating, his quality of life didn’t just reset to where it was before he stopped eating. It was like the clock got rolled back by years. He started running, and rolling, and playing with our other dog. He had energy and enthusiasm.

The effects on our younger dog weren’t nearly as pronounced because she was already young and spry, but we knew that under the covers it was making a huge difference in keeping her vibrant and alive, and would do so for the rest of her life. When Ben finally passed, we couldn’t - in good conscience - stop cooking for Lita, or our latest dog Maui.

What We Do

We always have a different breakfast and dinner meal in the fridge. When choosing the next ones we’ll cook we try to make sure to rotate through different proteins and starches. For example, breakfast might be a tub of “Chicken Thighs and Tabbouleh” while dinner is “Beef and Sweet Potato”.

This book, and another one we use, has a lot of recipes for treats. We ignore all of those. We make the “meals”. One of our dogs is 30lbs (13kg), and the other is 40lbs (18kg), so we typically double the recipes and end up making about 2.5 US Gallons worth of food in each batch. We divide it into two Tupperware tubs. One goes into the freezer, and the other is probably going to be their next meal.

The recipes are really simple, and many of them can be simplified even more. For example, dogs don’t really care if you chop the parsley leaves, so I’ve stopped bothering. I just rinse them to get rid of the grit, then rip off the leaves, and put half the pile into each batch.

Most of the meals involve chopping a bunch of chicken or tubers which end up in two big pots on the stove. The only notable changes we make to the recipes is never using garlic powder because garlic is toxic to dogs, and frequently replacing water with low or no sodium broth.

Slow cooker meals can’t be doubled, but are generally very easy to make and give us another option for getting different proteins and starches into their systems.

How Often?

A tub usually lasts us about four days. So, we end up cooking roughly two meals a week. Remember, each one is doubled so there’s a frozen half waiting when the first tub runs out. That being said, we try and cook ahead a little bit extra, so that when the time comes to grab something from the freezer we don’t have to just repeat what they just ate. We can rotate to a meal with a different protein and starch.

What Are They Like?

Generally, pretty bland and uninteresting to a humans. We need salt. They don’t. They’re generally 1 part meat, 1 part starch, and a handful or two of veggies. After getting familiar with what ingredients are safe for dogs, and the ratios it’s pretty easy to just make up a recipe on the fly from whatever meat you have available + random pantry things.

A couple of them are pretty tasty though. I always steal a couple bites of the “Chicken Thighs and Tabouleh” when its fresh, and when we’re feeding them “Overnight Oats” (yogurt, honey, lemon, oats, apples) I always steal a bite or four while filling their bowls.

Treats

There’s only one treat we make for our dogs, and I don’t remember where we found it. Take one large tub of plain yogurt. One jar of all natural^[1] smooth peanut butter. Mix with a stiff spoon, pour into massive silicone ice-cube molds, let freeze for about 24 hours.

We have found literally no treat that is higher value than this. Well, none that’s healthy to give to them with any regularity. One dog bites off pieces and devours his in under two minutes. The other dog slowly licks hers until it gradually disappears many minutes later.

Is This Really Healthy / Safe?

We’re not vets, but what I can tell you is that we’ve been doing this with three dogs now for over a decade. They get blood-work and a checkup every year, and every year our vet pronounces them healthy, .

New vets, and new vet-techs will be skeptical because most people who cook for their dogs do some weird ass things that don’t actually correspond to what a dog needs to be healthy. For example, they’re not vegetarians, so trying to give them a meat free diet is not great. Similarly, there are problems with raw diets too.

Additionally, you have to be vigilant about constantly rotating the things their eating. No meal you make will have all the nutrients they need. It’s just like feeding humans. Dog diets aren’t that different from ours, they just have a couple more things that are toxic, and - proportionally - need a lot more meat than we do.

Side note: every year they ask us how much we feed them at each meal, and every year we have to explain to them that whatever number we give them is meaningless because it doesn’t correspond to the caloric density of kibble which they’ve been trained on, and the calories, and nutrients they get from the same volume changes with literally every meal.

Downsides

There are two pretty obvious downsides.

Cooking two or three more meals every week sucks if you don’t have a House Spouse. Most people I know are too drained at the end of the day to cook their own meals, never-mind cook for the dogs.

Meat isn’t cheap. Veggies aren’t cheap. Dog meals use a lot of meat, and a good amount of veggies. We can only afford to cook for our dogs because we have tech-money coming into our household.

Less obvious is dialing in the proportions. Guidance for kibble volume does not apply. The caloric density is not only completely different, but it varies from meal to meal. Because we’re rotating constantly I’ve found a volume that works for each dog, and I always give them that volume. For some meals this means they’re getting less calories, for some meals they get more, but the constant rotation and the fact that we have two different meals every day evens this out in the end.

The only way to know how much to give you dog is to just watch their body weight very carefully. I don’t mean weighing them. I mean just looking down and making sure their ribs are just barely visible, and that their abdomens curve in behind them. If one of our dogs wasn’t a short-hair we’d probably have to weigh them every couple weeks.

Checking the shape of our black dog as I’m putting together their bowls has just become part of my routine.

Warning

Many people into healthy dog diet things swear by garlic powder for allergies and stuff like that. There is zero research to support this, and plenty of research showing that small amounts of garlic or onion can lead to kidney failure. Do Not feed your dogs any member of the Allium family: onion, garlic, scallions, shallots, leeks, or chives. The same goes for grapes and raisins.

If your dog consumes any of these you should induce vomiting immediately. You should know how, and have the things you’ll need to do so on hand. We have 60ml Irrigation Piston Syringes in our first-aid kits, and use that to get the appropriate amount of Hydrogen Peroxide down their throats.

Unfortunately the cookbook referenced above seems to want to add garlic powder to almost every meal.

Should You Do It?

If you can afford to buy extra meat and veggies every week, then yes. You absolutely should. Even when Wifey and I were both working and really really didn’t want to cook a dog meal in addition to our own, we knew what a huge difference it made to their quality of life, and continued to do it.

All Natural Peanut Butter: There are so many random ingredients thrown into peanut butter these days that it’s not worth the effort of buying anything except all-natural peanut butter that only has 1 ingredient (peanuts). Artificial sweeteners are toxic, and salt isn’t good for them, so keep it simple and buy the healthy stuff. ↩

The Interesting Problems With Hall Passes

2025-07-07T00:00:00-04:00

Table of Contents

Overview

A “Hall Pass” - for those not familiar with the term - is an agreement between partners in a monogamous relationship that a given partner would be allowed to have sex with one or more specific celebrities if the opportunity arose.

I was pondering this concept in the shower, and the more I considered it, the more interestingly problematic it became.

The Interesting Problems With Hall Passes

A Hall Pass is an acknowledgement that

you or your partner find someone outside of your relationship sexually attractive.
you or your partner would like to have sex with someone outside of your relationship.
one partner craves something sexually that the other can’t provide.
one partner is - theoretically - ok with the other partner having sex with someone outside their relationship.

Additionally Hall Passes are frequently discussed, and compared, publicly.

But, here’s where it gets interesting. Hall Passes are an exclusively monogamous concept^[1]. Monogamy is an agreement between two people to not have sex or romantic relationships with other people.

It’s a cultural expectation that a monagamous person would get jealous if their partner made romantic or sexual advances towards another person.
Sleeping with someone outside the relationship is not only a very common reason to dissolve the relationship, but if the couple is married it’s commonly a reason for a judge to defer to the person “cheated on” in matters of children and finances.
Even if someone executed their Hall Pass with full consent, I suspect it would cause significant emotional problems within the relationship afterwards.

If you have granted your partner a Hall Pass, you are explicitly stating that you are a practitioner of Ethical Non-Monogamy. That means you are explicitly not monogamous. Furthermore, it means that your relationship with your partner is also explicitly non-monogamous.

Consequences

The consequences are socially interesting.

Anyone who professes to be monogamous but has also granted a Hall Pass is either lying about being monogamous OR lying about granting their partner that freedom. I’d encourage anyone who has granted their partner a Hall Pass to spend some time introspecting, and trying to honestly answer which case is true.

If you’re lying about the Hall Pass to your partner: Does your partner know you didn’t really mean it? Why did you think that was an acceptable thing to lie to them about knowing that it would seriously harm your relationship if they believed you and/or acted on it.

If you’re lying about being monogamous it opens up lot more questions.

Have you publicly stated that (ethical) non-monogamy is bad / evil despite the fact that you’re non-monogamous?
Why are you preventing yourself from receiving additional comfort, or love, or sexual enjoyment?
Does your partner know? If not, will you tell them?
Do you, or will you, publicly speak out in support of Ethical Non-monogamy so that other people like you can live their lives openly and proudly?

Anyone who has talked about their or their partner’s Hall Pass is publicly acknowledging their support of Ethical Non-monogamy. The concept of a “Hall Pass” is very popular in western culture, but western culture is also dominated by Christianity, which - despite the bible condoning it^[2] - is very against non-monogamous relationships. So, if you’re a Christian who has received or granted a Hall Pass, what does that mean regarding your relationship to your church and/or religion?

Technically “closed” polyamorous relationships exist, where the multiple partners agree there won’t be any romantic and/or sexual additions to the group. A Hall Pass could theoretically exist in this form of ethical non-monogamy, but closed poly relationships seem to be pretty atypical. ↩
There are over 40 instances of non-monogamous relationships which the bible not only condones but lays out rules for. Admittedly, those were polygamous and the women didn’t generally have a choice, but the point here is that the Bible is very supportive of non-monogamous relationships. ↩

oho's Backstory

2019-05-23T01:03:48-05:00

I’m going tell you the tale of oho, a program which is arguably the world’s greatest ANSI text to HTML converter, and how it solved a real business problem. I’m sharing this because, as a geek, it’s important to remember that you can frequently solve work needs, while having fun creating open source tools that interest you.

Side note: ANSI escape sequences are the things that cause text to be colored, bolded, etc when displayed in a terimnal.

One of the roles I played at One Door was that of Release Manager. The core of that task was figuring out what code was included in, or missing from, a release - and then communicating that info to the Project Managers and Scrum Masters. Most importantly, I needed to make it clear to them if there were things they should be concerned about.

I accomplished this by writing a series of small, focused, command line tools that embodied the Unix Philosophy and worked together to extract data from Git, Github, and Jira, then combine it into a report which was transmitted to the interested parties via Slack.

The larger releases presented a problem though. Project Managers didn’t really want to read through the status of 300+ tickets, or contemplate what unexpected commits might mean to their release. It was too daunting of a task, and they had enough things on their todo list.

One of the strategies I took to help address this was to highlight unimplemented tickets, or unexpected commits, in different colors. Unfortunately, there’s no good mechanism to get terminal colors into Slack. Colored text just isn’t supported. For multiple reasons, the right answer seemed to be to give them a PDF version of what I was seeing in the output of my tools.

I didn’t find any extant ANSI to PDF converters, but that wasn’t surprising. I did find a number of HTML to PDF converters though, and I knew you could convert ANSI to HTML. So, I set up an ANSI -> HTML -> PDF pipeline and quickly discovered that my PDFs looked terrible. The problem was the HTML. Every existing ANSI to HTML converter had some aspect of it that made it just unusable. In one case, my half-page test grid of colors ended up being an unreadably small postage stamp in the corner once it made the final transition. Others didn’t actually support the various color codes very well.

Choosing a technology

aha (Ansi HTML Adapter) seemed the best of the available tools. It was written in C. I figured it was better (and faster) to debug and tweak something that was fast and mostly working, than it was to write something from scratch. Unfortunately, it’s source code was not up to my standards. It worked, but it wasn’t very readable, or commented, or well organized. It was more a stream of consciousness in code form. As I spent more time refactoring it, I realized that by the time I was done, I’d have a completely different codebase that was readable, and maintainable, but still not very extensible.

So, I began to write oho.

It was clear from my work refactoring aha that this was going to be a non-trivial codebase with multiple files. I wanted to write it in a language that would allow me to distribute it without people having to know anything about the ecosystem surrounding it. Ruby is terrible for that because you need to know about Gems, and Bundler, and most systems ship with old Ruby versions and… I wanted this to be simple for users. So, I needed a compiled language. Crystal met those requirements, and I’d been using it for a while and found it rather enjoyable, so that’s what I used.

Crystal produces Dynamically Linked executables (like most compiled languages) so distribution was just a matter of creating a Homebrew script (for Mac users) that told people’s computers where to download it and what dynamic libraries it dependend on. The same can be done for other systems with little difficulty.

Chicken Scheme would have been another choice I could have easily worked with, but beyond just producing a single executable, Crystal is less intimidating to most developers. Lisps are treated as exotic things with “too many parentheses.” I wanted something that could be easily enhanced by anyone in the Open Source community. Crystal looks very similar to Ruby (it’s essentially just Statically Typed Ruby), and organizes its code along lines that are familiar to most developers who use descendents of C (Ruby, Python, Java, etc). Crystal also has a decent testing framework built in. It could be better, but it gets the job done relatively painlessly.

So, I chose a language that would give me a single executable that required no knowledge of the language or ecosystem it was written in to install, would be easy to test, and easy to extend by people unfamiliar with the codebase. If I had it to do again, I might write it in Go, because of the Statically Linked executables it creates, along with easy cross-compilation.

In the end, I had a fast tool that I installed at work and began presenting the project managers with colorful PDFs for each release. Since then, I’ve added support for more esoteric escape sequences, and plan on continuing to do so in the future.

I also had fun writing it.

Your Own God(s)

2019-01-12T21:03:48-05:00

I’ve had an idea buzzbuling around my head for a while, that I’d like to share with you. If you’re a devout follower of any religion, I ask that you set aside what your preconceptions for a few minutes, and listen openly to this somewhat heretical thought.

Premise

All, or at least most, gods are created by people. Maybe I’m wrong, and there is one true deity, but logically if one is true, then all the conflicting gods must be the creation of human minds. If none are true, then they’re all human fiction.

No-one has any proof that their deity, or deities, are the true ones that will really handle our souls in the afterlife. Statistically speaking it is improbable that whatever god you’ve been told is the real one is, actually the real one (assuming any are). There are just too many gods. Plus, just because a lot of people agree about something doesn’t mean they’re correct. There is far too much historical evidence for that statement. In terms of religions, look at the Greek pantheon. Essentially no-one believes that the Greek gods exist, or ever existed, and yet countless people prayed to them daily. “Everyone” knew they were real, and now “everyone knows” they’re just old human fiction.

Additionally, we have the fact that holy teachings are constantly being twisted by their “faithful”. Witness the Christian Crusades completely ignoring the “Thou shalt not kill.” and “Love thy neighbor.” rules when they went off and killed or tortured vast swaths of people who believed differently. Priests of every religion disagree about what their god(s) want you to do all the time. The Bible, for example, has had the meaning of many of its passages dramatically changed through translation “errors” over the many versions since its original Aramaic. Even if the deities you were told were the “true” ones are actually, the true ones it is incredibly unlikely that what you were taught about what they want is actually “true”. Could any human language accurately, and unerringly, capture and describe the will of a god?

Reality

There’s no denying that the belief in deities has a very real value to very many people. The more difficult our lives are, the more we reach out to the gods for comfort and protection. Many people who truly pray seem to feel something positive come from their actions, even if it’s just the sense that someone is watching out for them.

Prayer, like meditation, influences our state of mind, which, in turn, influences our “state of body”. It reduces the experience of anxiety, elevates a depressed mood, lowers blood pressure, stabilizes sleep patterns and impacts autonomic functions like digestion and breathing. Further, in influencing our state of body-mind, prayer and meditation also influence our thinking. This prompts a shift in the habits of the mind, and, subsequently, patterns of behavior. These changes, in turn and over time, induce changes in the brain, further influencing our subjective and objective experience of the world and how we participate in it. - Psychology Today

Heresy

If gods are human fiction, and it’s unlikely that whatever god(s) you believe in are real, but having someone or something to believe in, and pray to, can provide us with comfort and solace, then why not create your own god or gods that reflect the world as you see it?

Imagine what happens when you start to live in a world surrounded by gods you know intimately; gods who manipulate, or ignore, the world around us in ways that are entirely sensible, because they are the ways you envisioned.

Maybe you create new ones. Maybe you repackage the ones you grew up with in newer garb that makes more sense to you. Maybe you love Jehovah, but can’t believe everything in a Bible that regularly contradicts itself. Maybe Zeus is still around, but not living on Mt. Olympus anymore. Maybe Media is a new god that far too many people pray to… It’s entirely possible that your personal god(s) may actually be a true description of the “real” god(s) given to you by holy inspiration.

Everything we’re taught tells us this is “wrong”. History, however, tells us this this is what humans have always done. For me the real question is, will you give yourself permission to take this leap? Will you give yourself permission to do what our ancestors did again and again? Even an atheist can benefit from their own personal pantheon to pray to, or swear by.

100(ish) things

2017-01-01T16:23:34-05:00

Many would not guess it, but I am a minimalist at heart. I don’t like looking around and seeing all the crap I’ve accumulated. So this year, I’m going to do something about it. This year, I’m working towards only owning 100(ish) things, and I’d like to encourage you to too.

The 100 is easy. The “ish” requires some explaining, but I feel it is the key to making this workable.

What follows is my guidelines for paring down to 100ish items. If that sounds like a goal you’d like to achieve too, keep reading.

ish #1

100 is a target, not a hard and fast rule. If I whittle it down to 104, and getting rid of those last 4 would be painful, I’ll stop at 104.

ish #2

Heath, safety, and “regular maintenance” items don’t count. Your first aid kit doesn’t count, even if it has 1000 items in it. Your tooth paste, soap, and tooth brush, don’t count. Your pills don’t count. Health and regular maintenance aren’t just limited to you though. Your car needs regular maintenance, and checkups too. Tire guage, Snow Chains for your car, Window Breaker, Snow Brush… All safety / maintenance items. Go Bags are also a form of safety item. Dog toys? Maintenance item (also, they’re not really yours), but maybe your dog(s) don’t need all those toys.

You will need to be careful with the “regular maintenance” items though. It’s easy to go “oh yeah i need that for ____” when it’s more a “want” or a “nice-to-have”, instead of a real need.

ish #3

Atypical Activities: Limiting yourself to 100 items will free us up mentally, but it’ll hamper our ability to do the non-everyday things that bring us joy. Camping, as an example, requires special equipment: sleeping bag, camp stove, water filter, etc. You should not have to give up camping, to enjoy downsizing. The items required for you whatever activity you love in your off time: they don’t count, but you still have to sit down and ask yourself which ones you actually need.

Bonus items!

Anything digital doesn’t count. It takes up no physical space. You can have 10,000 books!

Gray areas

To me, pills like Ibuprofin, count as health and maintenance. Any in the first aid kit, or medicine cabinet I won’t count, but if I choose to carry an extra bottle in my backpack? That bottle will count.

Groupings are complicated too. A keyring has many keys, but most people would call it one item. An Altoids tin filed with useful everyday items? Maybe. A box filled with crap you can’t decide on? Probably not one item.

Shared items. I don’t feel it’s right for me to get rid of items that my wife uses regularly too (like the stereo), but do I count that towards my 100? I dunno. I can talk to her about getting rid of items we don’t use anymore.

Work items. A woodworker needs a lot of tools, but maybe, they don’t need all their tools. Could you get your job done well with fewer things? Try working without them for 6 months. If you find you don’t need them, get rid of them.

Getting to 100(ish)

How each of us gets to 100 is going to be different. For me it’s going to start with Marie Kondo’s advice in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (It’s available on Audible too). At the heart of her teaching is a simple question: “Does this item bring me joy?” If it doesn’t, you get rid of it. I’d modify that slightly: “Does this item bring me joy? Is it actually required?” For example: I consider having a backpack to be a requirement. I use it to carry my laptop to work safely. Fortunately, I love my backpack.

My plan is simple. Each weekend I’ll address a room, or part of a room. I’ll do as much as I can find time for. I’ll choose the items I want to keep, and donate, or discard the rest. Once I’ve finished going through the house, I’ll go back, start counting, and repeat the process until I’m down to 100.

Staying at 100(ish)

I, like many of you, lust after things. I hear the siren call of “better”, and that’s ok. When you only have a few items it’s important to make sure they’re the best they can be. So, feel free to window shop. Just don’t pull the trigger unless you know that it’s an improvement over what you currently have, and know what you’re going to be getting rid of to compensate.

In the end, this will mean spending more money on fewer, but better things. In my experience, this will leave you with items that you really value, and appreciate having around.

To summarize

Let’s work on getting rid of things we don’t need, but keep ourselves safe and well cared for in the process. Only keep the stuff you really love, or really need. Get rid of all the “maybes”.

If this sounds good to you, but you’re still on the fence, consider these 7 reasons that keep people from getting started with minimalism.

Setting the Atomic Clock

2013-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

This morning’s shower brought me an interesting series of thoughts that I thought you might appreciate, and it all started with the simple question of “How do you set The Atomic Clock?”

My first thought was that at some point you have to find some other clock and precisely sync up with it. Then again, they may have said “fuck it” and just had Bob press a button when some other clock flipped over, but then I wondered “How do we know what time it is in the first place?”

Well, our calendar is based on the birth of Jesus, and we claim we know what day that was, and what town that was in. I’m ignoring that the details in the Bible point to a date that’s nowhere near Dec. 25th. Anyway… The first moment of the first day would, I suspect, be associated with the moment at which dawn broke in Jerusalem that morning. Or maybe some more esoteric moment that day. Regardless, let’s stick with dawn for the sake of attempting to figure out what time it is.

So, dawn, in Jerusalem, on day 1. Great we can work forwards from there. But, wait… how do we know how long a year is?

A year is the time it takes for the Earth to travel around the Sun, but how do we know when we are at the same place in the rotation we were exactly one year ago? You could try and position yourself relative to other heavenly bodies “When star X is directly behind the Sun.” But our orbit’s not circular, it’s elliptical. Actually, that’s not true either “The Earth travels around the sun in an elliptical orbit that varies in shape, with time from nearly circular to distinctly elliptical.” Then there’s the fact that every galaxy in the universe is shooting out away from the center of it.

If you ignore the orbital complication and say “ok, we can compensate for orbital weirdness”, how do you verify it with observation? Well you’d look up on… wait a minute. How the fuck do know where the same up is? In order to calculate our point in the Earths solar orbit we have to first be able to look up at the same point on different days. Which means we have to calculate exactly how long a day is, but “The tilt of the earth changes cyclically between 21 3/4 degrees and 24 1/4 degrees. The period of cyclicity is 42,000 years.”. On top of that we’re going around the sun.

So, even if the Earth wasn’t wobbling, and even if I knew exactly how long it took to spin 360° when I looked up the sun would be in a different place because we’ve moved around it. The stars would be in a different place because we’ve moved around the sun, and even if we hadn’t done that, the contents of the universe is still shifting outwards.

Back to figuring out how long a day is. So, we look up. We find something in the universe that we’re not rotating around to mark as a point of reference. We can compensate for the universe’s expansion by observing its Redshift (i think). So, we look up but once 23 hours have passed and we’re ready to start looking straight up again to observe the exact instant we’re lined up with that distant star (or whatever) the planet has wobbled on its own axis and now “up” will be pointed in a different direction than it was exactly one day ago. So, now we have to calculate the the wobble of the planet…

At that point I needed to get out of the shower. But I do know that the wobble’s going to be affected by the fact that we’re on a large ball of rock that’s got a molten core, which means liquid sloshing around in the center (for some definition of “sloshing”). I’ve no clue how one would determine that we even have a liquid center. Maybe by the fact that we’re wobbling?

To summarize:

In order to calculate the correct time you must:

Figure out the speed at which the universe is expanding so that we can use a distant star as a reference point to observationally confirm all the other things we need to figure out.
Figure out the Earth’s eccentric wobble. No clue how to do that. My shower ended. Once you’ve got that you can then figure out how long a day is.
Now store away what you’ve learned about our wobbling rock with a liquid center. We’ll need that.
Once you know how long a day is, and what direction you’re pointing after a given span of time, you can then start observing our orbit by marking the location of the sun relative to you and some distant star. So, now you can figure out how long it takes you to get around the sun. Unfortunately that’s going to change every single year as our orbital path changes.
So observe those changes for enough years to calculate how our orbit changes. Then factor in the effects of a wobbling mass on an orbit.

Once you’ve done all that you can then work backwards to calculate out where the hell the sun was over Jerusalem on December 25th 2013 years ago, and then you can work forwards to figure out what time it is.

You’re still going to have the problem of actually syncing the clock with the math though.

P.S. How was your shower?
P.P.S. Those links? Missouri Department of Natural Resources, Division of Energy. “Global Climate Change: Effect of the Earth’s Orbit”
P.P.P.S. I’m not a Physicist. I just play one on the Internet.

There's always more to learn

2012-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

My mother was an incredibly talented artist. For most of my life, she made here living teaching private students, and getting them ready for entry into art colleges.

Once upon a time a student of hers got her a present. It was a Horse-hair calligraphy brush, a solid ink stick (add water and rub), and an instructional book on Chinese calligraphy.

She was very worried about giving the gift though. She didn’t want to instruct a teacher she greatly respected by giving her an introductory how-to book. But it was a gift from the heart, and one she believed my mother would enjoy.

My mother was a master of all the traditional western fine-arts media: oils, pencils, sculpture… but she had no direct experience with Chinese calligraphy, and I suspect they’d had had a discussion about it during one of their lessons.

It was one of the most precious gifts she ever received. It taught her something, and meant all the more because of the students courage in giving it. She gradually worked through that ink stick, playing with calligraphic brush lines, and remembering who gave it to her.

She never let ego get in the way of learning, and it was a lesson I’ll never forget.

There’s always more to learn, and sometimes, it comes from unexpected places. Always welcome it with open arms.

I love the internet

2012-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

Something kind-of amazing just happened.

Background:

Unglue.it is a really cool site, that I’d never heard of until Amazon decided to stop processing payments for them. Think Kickstarter for freeing out-of print books. They get people to create a wishlist of books they’d like to see released as Creative Commons licensed DRM-free ebooks. They then talk to the authors and publishers of the books people want to find out how much money it would take to “unglue” them. Then they crowdsource that amount.

Cool as that is, it’s not the amazing bit. The amazing bit is what happened next.

The Amazing:

Having read of their plight, and pondered their coolness, I started thinking about alternatives. Dwolla is a similarly cool service that aims to replace PayPal and Credit Cards with something that doesn’t screw everyone involved. They’ve already started to change the way banks do business with each other, and I’ve got really high hopes for them. At the moment they don’t do the kind of delayed payments that crowdfunding sites need, but there’s a lot of money to be made by payment processors who can help crowdfunding sites manage their pledges, so I figured that Dwolla had probably been thinking about this.

How amazing would it be if projects didn’t have to give up 5% of their crowdfunded revenue to a payment processor? Dwolla only charges $0.25 per transaction, and only on ones over $10. I really wish I could chose to pay with Dwolla on the projects I help out on Kickstarter. And, while Unglue.it is still fairly small, it’d be great press. “Dwolla enters the crowfunding scene by helping to free out-of-print books.” Sounds good to me.

So I sent a little tweet pondering the connection…

masukomi: I’m wondering if @dwolla wouldn’t be able to help @unglueit out with their current problems with Amazon payments. http://blog.unglue.it/2012/08/09/ope…

And that’s where the amazing began. Ben Milne (bpmilne) is the founder of Dwolla, and while I didn’t directly message him, he’s (unsurprisingly) watching the @dwolla stream.

bpmilne: @masukomi @dwolla @unglueit sure - drop us a line.

unglueit: @bpmilne Emailed you via contact form on your web site.

unglueit: @bpmilne Will do. @masukomi @dwolla

bpmilne: @unglueit @masukomi <> @ajt

ajt: @bpmilne @unglueit @masukomi Hey- email me at [censored] and/or API@dwolla.com happy to help! :)

bpmilne: @ajt @unglueit @masukomi connected- i love the internet.

I couldn’t agree more.

I hope it works out for them. I’d love to see Unglue.it succeed, and I’d love to see more places start letting me use Dwolla to pay them.

Turning Down Apple

2012-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

I just turned down an interview with Apple.

There are a few companies who, when they call with a job offer you’ll respond with “fuck yes”. Apple is on that list for me. And yet…

A recruiter called me the other day. Apple needs someone and my particular skillset and background. It seemed to be a pretty good match, and she’d been looking for a while. An internal tool building kind of job, in a language I enjoy, for a company I admire? Fuck yes. Would you be willing to move? “Fuck yes.”

Examining the actual job posting and pondering some of the recruiter’s comments made me wonder if the skillset they were asking for was actually the what they really wanted, but it was still close enough to be worth trying for. It’s Apple after all.

But then we did a little research. For an additional $600 per month we could get a one bedroom apartment in a complex in some nearby burbville*, versus our 2 bedroom house abutting a park in Cambridge. Yeah, I’d have a bit more cash at the end of each month, but I’d still be stuck in a cube, in a soul-sucking burbville, in an apartment complex. Even if we could find a place by the nearby state parks we’d still have to deal with burbs, sprawl, and strip malls every time we ventured outside for anything.

Alternately we could move to some beautiful portion of Vermont and I could telecommute to my current job. The drop in living expenses would be bring me about as much additional take-home as a salary bump from Apple. Yeah, the project’s not as interesting, and the company’s not as cool as Apple (few are), but being able to work in a home office I created? Being able to causally fuck-off for 20 minutes without stressing about pretending to work, as every coder I know has to do, because it’s not humanly possibly (excluding severe autistics) to focus on a single task all day long?

If you’ve got the self-discipline to work from home and still get your tasks done on schedule, the bump in your quality of life is so dramatic that it easily cancels out many of the workplace frustrations, and totally trumps extra cash. To me the idea of being able to look out my window and see trees, to take a break to play with the dogs or chat with Dachary… That’s worth so much.

So, I thanked her for her interest, and turned down what’s likely to be my only chance to work at Apple… unless of course, they find a position I could telecommute for. Or, if they set up shop in the middle of the woods. ;)

A good life is better than a good paycheck any day of the week. Even if that paycheck’s from a great company.

* I consider track housing to be the urban planning equivalent of the office cubicle. The lower half of California is rife with these things, and the more standard burbs aren’t much better if you ask me, but just to be clear: I do currently live in Cambridge MA, which is pretty far from a view of beautiful trees, but I do love this city, and if I’m not in the woods, it’s one of the few places I’d be happy living. That being said, we have been discussing finding a place in VT with trees, and a nice net connection. ;)

Why your tiered password scheme is flawed, and what to do about it.

2009-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

First, let me explain what I mean by “tiered password scheme”. Many perfectly smart people I know have one strong password they use for one or two online banking type sites. They’ll then have a “medium security” password they use on sites that kind of important to them (maybe those sites have their credit card info stored), but not critical to day to day stuff. Then they’ll have one or two passwords they use on all the other sites like Twitter, Yahoo!, Facebook, GMail, etc.

Obviously they’re being relatively careful about the important stuff and that’s good, but the flaw in this system is in the perception of pain. People think “wow, it would massively suck if my bank account password got out, but it’s not such a big deal if my Twitter password gets compromised. I can always make another Twitter account.” Or, they’ll say “Why would anyone care about hacking my account? There’s nothing special about it.” And while there’s nothing inaccurate about those thoughts, they’re also totally missing the point.

The thing is that many of those low value sites aren’t even remotely careful with your data. They’ll store your passwords unencrypted on their servers. And while people are unlikely to try and go after your account in particular, it’s not unthinkable that someone might try to hack Twitter (just an example), or even better, one of the myriad tools that you have to enter your Twitter username and password into and are much more likely to be insecure.

Now, they’ve got a list of thousands, or maybe millions, of usernames and passwords and because so many people use a tiered password scheme (or worse, only one password) those passwords are going to work all over the place. Now, most people I talk to say “I can just make another Twitter account.” but It’s not just *that* account. How many hundreds of sites have you used that low value password at? Do you really want to go and change it on all of them? And how would you even know you need to change it on all of them. Considering how many you’ve probably used it at, it’s a safe bet that someone could be using your name and spamming people, or linking to virus ridden sites, or whatever from your account and you might not find out about it for months, if ever. Not because it’s your account, but because your username and password just happened to be in the list of thousands they stole from some site. It is simply not realistic to claim that, if you somehow knew the password had, or might have been compromised, you are going to change it on all the sites you’ve used it at. And worse, if any of your accounts that got compromised, and probably killed by administrators, were ones where you’d made friends, built up lists of contacts, etc., then you’re going to be experiencing some serious pain and frustration when it comes to figuring out how to contact all those people, telling them that no, that wasn’t really you trying to sell them male enhancement pills, and that you’ve got a new account now…. Gods forbid this happens to your e-mail account.

So, what are you supposed to do? Well, the “simple” answer is that you’re going to have to start using a different password on every site, and, because you’re human, you’re going to have to use a password manager to keep track of them all. There are a ton of password managers out there and while they’ll all get the job done securely, the usability of these apps varies wildly. Typically the process is: load a web page that needs a password, launch your password manager (if it isn’t running already), find the entry for this site in a list, copy the password to your clipboard, switch back to the browser, select the password field, and paste in the password. That’s six steps, two applications, and possible wait time while one of them launches, just to enter a password!

“But Kay,” you say, “my browser remembers my passwords.” And that’s great. It’s going to save you from having to do this all the time, but sooner or later your browser’s cache is going to get emptied, and you’re going to have to go through the process again. Even worse, what if you’re at someone else’s computer?� The latter is a strong argument for having a password manager on your smartphone, but the usability is even worse when you’re talking about an entirely different device that you can’t copy the password from to paste into your browser.

So, again, what are you supposed to do? Well, first off, you need a password manager that’s not going to make you leave your browser. This means we’re talking about browser extensions, or maybe a web based password manager. And while there are a ton of choices, some of them are wildly complicated and most of them fail when it comes to usability. If you’re going to stick with this, and protect your identity and passwords the way you should it is absolutely imperative that you use a tool that makes it easy, easy, easy, to get your passwords in there. The act of retrieving your password and entering it into the site you want can’t be frustrating or annoying to you. [Update: A number of people have felt that I’m trying to promote Passpack below. Passpack just happens to be one of the few services that meets all of my personal criteria, but there are other services out there and I encourage you to explore them. Furthermore, web based services aren’t right for everyone. Some of us prefer Firefox Extensions, or apps that live on our phones.� Really, I just want you to go find a tool that will help you to practice good password hygene, and am offering up what I’ve discovered whilst searching for tools for me.]

So far I’ve only found one that I’m really willing to recommend: Passpack. Unlike most web-based password managers it can work offline, if you have Google Gears installed. It’s got a ton of features (probably far more than you need), and while it’s interface can be a bit overwhelming with all it’s options and it’s big grid of icons, it appears relatively easy to use, and most of the time you’re just going to click its bookmarklet when you want to log in to some site you’ve stored the password for. Once you’ve saved a password for a site it’s two clicks the next time you need to retrieve your password and log in. I definitely recommend checking out their video tour. [Update: the icon grid, can be turned off, and will be off by default in the next version.]

When it comes to browser extensions I simply haven’t seen any that get the usability right. Some have daunting management screens, or just bad tools for initiating the action of getting the password and almost all of them finish by copying the password to the clipboard and making you paste it in to the form, which is just brain-dead considering that extensions have access to essentially every feature of the browser. Many (most?) of them are going to leave you screwed if you need to access a site from someone else’s computer. The same can be said for desktop apps. The things the extensions do typically do right is generate good passwords for you, store them securely, and save you from having to open another app. But, all of the ones I’ve seen simply aren’t painless enough when it comes to usability, or management, or both. Actually, there was one exception that got the usability right, but ultimately encouraged users to go with something resembling a tiered password scheme.