fillosophy

Here’s an interesting thought, trust me it all makes sense near the end…

I say the real world is a place where people, for the most part, are lacking common sense, common decency, common courtesy - they’re lacking intelligence, knowledge, insight, creativity, attention-span, wonder, sense of adventure, risk, passion, romance, and selflessness.

Those of you whom are intelligent, pride yourselves on your brain, and use it to gain knowledge, and more often than not will consciously be aware of your intellectual superiority and not understand why people think you’re a pompous fuckbag that deserves to be lead by someone less intelligent than you, and you are bitter for it, never ending your quest to simply find like minded people, and ultimately ostracize those that you find annoying because they’re a few mph slower than you.

Those of you whom are passionate-optimists think the world of people, and humanity, and always hold on to a grain of hope in your heart that things are always getting better, and people have good in them no matter who they are. Optimism is a blind road to travel, mixed with passion, and you’ll eventually just end up one of those people that are so clouded by their surroundings that you’ll think “everyone’s the way that I am, because that’s all I see”. This of course files the passionate-optimist under close-minded and completely lacking understanding and knowledge.

Those of you whom are insightful, creative, full of adventure, risk and selflessness - and are 100% honest about those qualities… well, most of you end up working for an international organization handing out food to starving children, and I think that’s great! But take out the 100% in those qualities and we have a typical artist or author, that’s simply living a dream built on empty hopes, and short term (or shallow long term) goals that will simply act as a self-fulfilling motivator to prove their decisions were the right ones.

What the hell does this have to do with … Debate? Well, first allow me to explain one thing. I can take anyone’s life and point out the bad, that’s just the matter of fact of things, and most people can do this as well… unless you’re eternally passionate-optimistic. Mostly I’ve just described my faults, as an intellect, as a passionate individual (especially when I’m feeling optimistic), and as an insightful, creative person - with a small sense of adventure, huge risk taker, but also somewhat selfless when it comes to working with those I respect around me.

Over the years, I’ve become increasingly aware of the factors that are involved in understanding where the mistakes in decisions come from within myself, and I explained that to a friend of mine the other day:

“I keep my curve as level as possible, keeping my peaks and valleys of good and bad at a minimum, allowing me to sway one way or the other quickly, without going too far into the depths or heights of one or the other… this keeps me clear minded, my expectations level headed, and my decisions solid, and carefully created”.

What does that mean? My Curve, in case you missed it - is the mind/soul/heart attitude and awareness. I keep them all at an even playing field, as much as possible, and when one gets overly excited about a great idea, the other one will kick in and either support or fail. If all three items aren’t in sync with one another about an action, decision, or idea - than it gets abandoned, or written down to revisit when another scenario arises that could help bring that idea into view again.

This does… what? Keeps my emotions from getting the best of me, keeps my random soul on pace (most of the time) and ultimately - keeps me very level headed when dealing with people-situations. The adverse effect of this, and what other’s don’t understand most of the time, is, it also allows me to see which one of your 3 curve-items are out of sync, and use those against you in an argument, decision, scenario, or debate.

Beneath the foundation of all things surface, on the core fundamental level (think critically with me people), you have the common factors of all things in your life that drive everything you say, do and act on. Some people are more emotional than others - consistently. Some people are more consistently methodical. The creepy ones are consistently on “auto-pilot” (soul driven) not using any heart or mind in their decisions… yikes.

Most people will always be in one state more than the other two, which makes them “who they are” to others, but also, most people (I say most, because sociopaths don’t really have all these options) will be in one state or the other of the three at any given time. It’s a matter of how fast you can place them in alignment with one another to ensure when a decision is being made, that has an impact, that your clarity in that decision’s outcome is actually in alignment with the greater picture, the longer term goal, and how that decision will effect the other decisions around it… thus making you, a pretty interesting person to debate with.

This “person-set” is about creating a balance within yourself, and using that to create an understanding in you that will allow you to ultimately be able to decipher others and which state they’re in. Creating an advantage in a discussion, if they’re imbalanced, and if not - you have a good debate ahead of you.

By debate I mean, of course, life decisions that involve others. Arguments, and discussions are just forms of debate, but one has too much emotion, while the other has too much brain. Compromise has too much brain, not enough intelligence, and sacrifice is just someone getting taken advantage of and losing. I choose my debates with others carefully, but more often than not will choose the 5 outcomes I’m looking for and work toward those while debate is evolving… I’ll have to get into that one later though, I have work to do.

enrique
fillosophy.net : author
enrique-gutierrez.com

Here’s a lesson on predictability, namely with people, and specifically with dealing with typical people. First, for the purposes of the philosophical requisites of this site, I’ll define - Typical People: The common person in today’s society, the system of individuals everyone knows I absolutely adore </sarcasm>; is someone that lives up to the expectations of a smart and compassionate person. In other words, they lack compassion, intelligence, soul, heart, feelings, romance and/or common sense/decency/courtesy.More definitions

Soul: That person you are inside that tells you to be a respectable, respecting person to yourself, and to those you come in contact with. We can also call this the common decency engine.

Heart: Being able to confront and admit to feelings beyond your thoughts.

Feelings: Related to heart, but more in the sense of ego, as in, attentiveness to other’s feelings based on how you would feel under a similar circumstance. In most cases, most people, don’t “care”.

Romance: That little thing that used to drive men to achieve great things to win the hearts of a woman, and vice versa. This has been replaced, as I’ve already once gone over.

Common Sense/Decency/Courtesy: Again, from another post. These are the ability to make decisions, and act, as though you should toward others, and with regard to yourself. These qualities don’t take intelligence, nor knowledge, they merely takes the ability to pay attention, and pay respect… Some other rarities.

Compassion: Acting from the heart and soul toward a goal or outcome.

The Observation

Considering most social situations lack most, actually most all, of the above qualities; and thus most people lack these qualities, they’ve been re-defined by those people to these new synonyms:

Soul, you can now call, Stuck up.

Heart, you can now call, Emotional.

Feelings, you can now call, Sensitive.

Romance, you can now call Pansy.

Common Sense, you can now call Pompous.

Common Decency, you can now mistake for boring, clean cut, gay or metro.

Common Courtesy, you can call Trying too hard.

Compassion, you can now call Pathetic.

What people will commonly do is quickly judge the negative aspects of a person’s personality if they are compassionate, heart-felt, and romantic - and blow those qualities out of proportion to make their own inadequacies seem more socially acceptable. Even me typing this, I’ll appear as though I have some kind of superiority complex, and of course its even worse, since I’m able to talk shit about the typical person with such clarity, there will be no room left but to escape to discrediting the personality characteristics I portray. Even better, I’ll get the usual hate e-mails and comments that I’ll have to start approving, just to show people exactly what I’m talking about.

With that crap said, let me get to the point:

Here’s what I’m dealt. The general lack of understanding, and even worse, my general lack of tolerance, just leaves me with the seeming inability to mingle with others. Either they don’t “get it” or I’m unwilling to share what the fuck it is I’m even doing… You’d be surprised at the reactions I get for simply listening to someone, and providing feedback into a conversation, consistently. Giving someone undivided attention is mind blowing to most people, and its interesting to see reactions when doing something cordial or polite just out of nature, and respect for someone.

Here’s an example; I go out to dinner with someone, they get the door to the restaurant opened for them, they walk in front of me, they sit down at the table first, they order first, they’re engaged in conversation about themselves as well as their day, and they’re listened to. Their dinner is cordially paid for, and there is no hurry to leave. There is a walk after dinner for more conversation, and when walking, they walk on the inside of the walkway. The car door is opened for them, and when in the car, they are, again, engaged in conversation about themselves or their friends, etc. During all conversations, if I can relate in a non-selfish manner, stories are traded, and shared, but bragging about the bullshit successes in my life are saved for random conversation or story sharing. Date conversation is about expressing similar differences between likenesses in stories, not to boast about achievements and brag about what you’ve done.

What happens as a result? Well for the most part this is completely new to most people, and if it isn’t, it was done by some assmongrol that’s just playing up the gentleman role to get in the good graces of someone’s ass he wants to wax and share his hidden camera adventures with his buddies over brews and football the next day. Lame. As a result, here are the conclusions:

1. Skeptical: Being too respectful means that I obviously just want something and I’m acting up some player role to get what I want, which would ultimately, of course, be ass.

2. Distrusting: I’m hiding something… I mean, what other reason could there be for me to put up a front of cordially polite gentlemanly traditional actions? I must be a rapist or something.

3. Turned-off: I’m simply too fake to actually think that I could ever engage in conversation with someone, I mean - why the hell would a guy ever listen to a girl anyway? That’s just crazy…

4. Appreciative… but: (These are my favorite) What the hell am I thinking? Treating my dates with respect? I’m sure its nice and all, and the date totally thinks I’m a sweety… but… Really? Who does that shit? Why? For what? Respect is over-rated for sure, and getting to know someone as opposed to just filling their gaps with man-pole and forgetting their name the next day, or moving onto their sister, is a much better way to live life.

5. Scared off: I must be looking for some kind of long-term wife material if I’m over here playing up some Casanova act. Honestly, and you know - the women I date would much rather spread legs than spread thoughts… Leaves out moral obligations if they end up not really being appreciated.

Can’t relate? Come to Southern California - where 7/10 women have been run through a ringer of lies and deceit by all the morons money could muster up. and the other 3/10 seem to be too busy taking care of their Chihuahua, Fluffles, to actually pay attention to someone long enough to give them the respect they deserve.

It’s a whirlwind of tainted, shallow, vapid youth - and even though I’m not so “youth” anymore, I’m still not old. Too bad the generation before mine wasn’t more hard-pressed on instructing their offspring how a real man treats a lady, and how a bitch should act to be considered a lady instead of a vapid cock-catcher.

Oh well though, huh? I enjoy it. My standards stay up here, as I watch all those other people go through Mystery Method-type rituals in order to get some play, get knocked up, and get wire-hangered so they can go out and do it all again the next weekend.

enrique
fillosophy.net : admin
www.n-re-k.com

Topic Web2.0

So it wasn’t much of a philosophically deep discussion about the problems with world poverty, over-population, political whatever, etc… It was about Life Streaming.

Life Stream (n) : A site or conglomerate sites that a group or single person uses to display moments, events, happenings, conversations, sayings or quotes in an open format viewable by others. The medians can be video, photo, text, voice - or any other viewable, editable format available on the Web.

First (the fillosophy piece); having your life out there to share with others is the idea behind MySpace and army of other sites. Given the right content, and context, you can use your life stream to help others with certain things - like that really neat script you wrote for work to help you keep your applications easily accessible to improve your productivity… But if you don’t really have anything to share with others, try to find something - and outlook, opinion, cause… hell anything you value; and if nothing else, entertainment. In other words… try not to wste bandwidth with meaningless dribble… well, ALL the time, anyway.

Onto the fun stuff, what’s a good foundation for a life stream?

It’s super simple to get into too much, too fast, when looking into the Web 2.0 “hey world, here’s me” cycle. Some choices should be made, perhaps just based on preference, others based on… “peer pressure”. For me? First and foremost, you’ll want a stomping ground central, also-known-as a blog.

Wordpress or a Personal URL with an install of Wordpress?
This one’s all your choice, really. I went the Wordpress route first for fillsophy.net.. but found that the URL was open. Being a Web Developer… it was a pretty clear decision for me. I want more control over stuff (like tracking, and mail, and actually getting my hands into the data structure… so here we are). Once you have your own URL you can do things like what’s been done on n-re-k.com.

Registering a Domain Name is pretty simple and you can find name availability at a number of sites. I’d not recommend using places like Yahoo! to register your domain, rather find a web hosting services that’ll allow you to register a name and get some server (hard drive) space. Recommend IX Web hosting, APlus Hosting, GoDaddy’s ok - or you can use my shameless self promotion and ask me how much I charge for hosting through my company Aten Syndicate.

Twitter or Pownce?
If you haven’t heard of one, or haven’t heard of either - don’t sweat it. These sites are so amazingly straight and too the point, its almost insulting. What they do: Twitter and Pownce are geared for micro-blogging; short message/phrase statements about your day to day that you can share with friends and connections online in a easy to see time line format. They’re spidered by search engines like crazy, and often my twitters about my blogs show up on Google well before my actually site does… that’s the “roi” portion of why to get a microblog.

Twitter features: Mobile access from WAP browsers (m.twitter.com), SMS support (update your twitter from your mobile phone), IM support (update your twitter from AIM), fully customizable profile color schemes and background images, friend count, direct messages and badges for your blog(s) and other online stuff. There’s also a Facebook application you can embed on your page, as Twitter is an RSS feed-ready stream (outbound only).

Pownce features: Send files (10MB on the free account, 100MB on the pro account); Send messages to defined groups/the public time line/directly to a friend/or in reply to a specific post; a selection of templates for your profile’s look and feel, and it’s also RSS feed-ready (outbound only).

Tumblr!
I’m not sure if there are other ‘hosted’ tumblelogs out there, but I’ll assume that since this once came from recommendation Ms. Lisa Brewster of Sophistechate it’s not only the best one, its probably the most functional… Because this thing kicks serious Web 2.0 booty. I was going to save the aggregates stuff for the end, but this is new to me, and I’m fairly excited about it. Tumblr allows you to create an account (obviously) but point the name of your site to it… For example http://tumble.n-re-k.com - very handy for us Search Engine addicts.

Anyhow, Tumblelogs, from what I gather, is a series of everything web that you find interesting enough to note. Be it, a quote on a page, a URL, a video, a chat conversation, a picture, or some text. I mentioned aggregate… Certain sites such as Jaiku and Tumblr allow you to specify an RSS feed from another source, to stream it on your page at that site. So in the case of Tumblr; I can post something on Twitter, and have it appear (via RSS) on tumble.n-re-k.com. So now one update can go to more than one place, and low-and-behold; your neat fun-filled fact that you posted on twitter is now available… pretty much wherever you tell it to show up.

Flickr or Zoomr
WHAT?!? You don’t have a Flickr account?! Get one. Flickr and Zoomr are easy to use; integrated with RSS (so you can web 2.0 the crap out of your photos), and -my personal favorites- (though I’ve only used Flickr); the groups and comments allows you to check out and talk about other people’s photographic works, share stories about an event, add favorites and tons of other stuff.

YouTube
I’m not a vlogger (video blogger), so I can’t say much on behalf of the video blogosphere people, but I do know that people use it, and often. YouTube allows for RSS output as well, so that’s handy… very handy; and other than that? The comments are open for those of you in the know on other… better… vlogging sites.

Social Networks:
MySpace - ever heard of this one?

Facebook - Much cleaner than MySpace, with tons of add-on applications available for Twitter and Flickr, among others, Facebook is simply a better way to manage online communications with people you actually know. Some people tend to get narcissistic when it comes to “how many” eFriends someone has, or how emo they can be… Facebook? doesn’t really matter if its on that site; its weirdly easier to never see it.

LinkedIn - For you employed people, LinkedIn is a great place to keep track of co-workers and give each other pats on the back for doing awesome work.

Eventful - This isn’t the only organized-event calendar on the planet, but I happen to be partial to this one. Its quick, simple, easy to share events with people you know, or groups of people on the site, other events are easy to browse, its Web 2.0 friendly, and its where the BarcampSD people hang out… we’re cool like that.

Tools:
Check out the list of tools and other online applications below. I could go on and on about all the stuff that’s out there for your to share your life stream with your friends and relatives; but in the end, you just have to really look at the site, the features, how it interfaces, and then decide which one works better ffor you:

• Feedburner - Publicize via bookmarking
• Technorati - Track, publicize and organize blogs
• del.icio.us- Share your online favorites
• Digg - Share your online… favorites
• Stumbleupon -Also share your online favorites, but add them to your lifestream! (RSS out)

I’m leaving out a TON, trust me… But these are a good start.

enrique
fillosophy.net : admin
www.n-re-k.com