Fifteen points!
It’s been a long morning. I’ve already been to work and home again, and I go back to work in a few hours. Needless to say, I needed coffee. And, as I walked in the door to the coffee shop, there was a besuited twenty-something, standing stock still, in the middle of the doorway, blocking my entry. He appeared to have shut off. But no, as I peered around him, I realized he had his Crackberry out, and was furiously typing away on his keypad.
I politely said “Excuse me”, and he didn’t move, so engrossed was he in the tiny screen. I cleared my throat, and repeated myself, louder this time. Still no movement. A third time brought a continued absence of response. So, finally, quite loudly — loudly enough to bring all other conversation in the shop to a screeching halt — I announced, “Hey! Pay attention to the MeatSpace and MOVE. Cyberspace can wait.” I think he jumped a solid two feet in the air.
I am as guilty as anyone with a smart-phone of shutting off to respond to an email, or insult someone on Facebook, but I make a standing rule to get the hell out of the way before I do it. Now, granted, I’ve noticed that if I do this, there will be nosy elderly women who insist on looking at whatever item it is that I happen to be standing in front of. There could be an entire empty store, and they will bee-line it directly to me, to see whatever is hidden behind me. Really. You absolutely needed to look at this pile of bundled firewood? That’s why you’re in this store? Of course you are. Oh, but now it’s not the right colour, that’s why you don’t want it? That’s what I thought.
It does seem increasingly that I am in the minority in my attempts to be courteous. I’ve watched people stop, stone cold, in the middle of a crosswalk to start texting. Is that text more important than your life? Really? You couldn’t wait a few seconds to type, “LOL WUT OMG!”? It baffles me, and drives me insane. I’ve used my horn just as much for texting pedestrians as I have for inattentive taxi-cabs, and that’s saying something quite remarkable in Edmonton!
What’s your biggest MeatSpace public technology pet peeve?
I've heard people referred to as meatbags, but never the space they live in as meatspace. I think it's brilliant.
Example of the use of meatbag in a sentence: http://www.vexxarr.com/archive.php?seldate=041906
meatspace has been in use for quite a while, although, you generally have to hang out with giant computer geeks to run into it (I've been using it for the better part of a decade, and I'm sure it's much older than that). Feel free to absorb it into your lexicon.
Edit: Also, I often think of 'meatbag' as a slur an AI would use to against a human. If I ever write a game, the computer opponents will use it to refer to the player.
In that old science fiction novel, the funny one, "Tik-Tok," which was about a robot rebellion against the human race, we humans were referred to by the robots as "shitbellys." I'd rather be a meatbag than that, I mean that's just rude. I can't remember the writer's name, but Heinlein made a reference to that book in one of his Lazarus Long novels. I haven't read or seen the Tik Tok novel in print for years, but I remember it as having been a fun but stupid read, which was the way it was written.
My first encounter with the term was thru Willam Gibson,
i believe in "Burning Chrome"
http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-4.2.0.dos.t…
meatspace is in the 2000 esr jargon file, he does not say where it came from.
While watching ST IV: TVH the other day (which happens more than I care to admit but not as often as you might think), I laughed at the scene on the where the punk rocker was blasting an obnoxious song on a boom box on a public bus. All of a sudden it doesn't seem so bad when some hipster has his iPod a little too loud and you can hear his earbuds buzzing.
<img src="http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR2iis1pcHwMQ0lxl4g7FpR-xTPJrmt3QAvXpBmqvUDKVc4CEDjhVpdqqfs" width="400">
Get off my lawn anyway!
/Fun* fact, the obviously too old punk rocker was Kirk Thatcher, an associate producer.
* using the term fun loosely.
<a href="http://www.eeggs.com/items/5102.html” target=”_blank”>http://www.eeggs.com/items/5102.html
In order to tie my complaint in with the question, I will make a tenuous and unsubstantiated claim about the effects of technology. The last 2 places I have lived, South Texas and coastal Virginia, have fairly disparate demographics. Yet in both people seem to have absolutely no concept of personal space. Any store seems the worst, they will crowd up on you in line, or push past you without so much as a by your leave to reach something on the shelf.
My theory is that social media has jumped
the sharkpersonal boundaries, making far too much personal business everyone's business. Grandma sees your tweet about how big of a poop you had this morning? No big deal.Thus the personal space boundaries of Meatspace disappeared as people came to accept these social norms from the internet as normal.
I do seem to notice more and more kids (<18) that don't seem to get the whole personal space thing. This usually happens in line at restaurants. I haven't had to jab an elbow in their eye….yet. "Oops, sorry, I just turned around and you were there"
Dearthair, you are much nicer than I am, after the third "excuse me" I would have just put a shoulder down and bulldozed my way through. Must be that Canadian thing.
Ditto for me, although I might have brought out the pocket welder, just to see how long it would take him to notice.
I really want a portable ESD gun. I figure with enough voltage it would take car of most mobile electronics including thumpin' car stereos.
Oh, they will, they will. But they are notoriously indiscreet in their targets. You also end up hitting traffic lights, car ignition systems, nearby policemen, innocent passerby, etc. They're damned hard to make portable too, what with the size of the capacitor banks and the necessary batteries to recharge them. I've worked on this problem before, you see.
Possible solution to the portability issue:
A Tesla Coil bank for remote generation of power. Leave the 'power source' in the car, just carry the 'dispenser'. Just as long as you don't mind anyone between you and the power source getting fried, too. *shrug*
I took 11th grade English the summer after 10th grade. The large majority of my classmates were taking 11th grade English for the second or third time.
The teacher had no interest in teaching a bunch of screwups. The class met for 3.5 hours per day. She would spend the first 10 minutes checking roll and give us a day's worth of assignments, then go down the hall to socialize with her teacher friends who also didn't want to teach. The minute she left the room, somebody would run to her desk, grab the answer key, and call out the correct answers, instructing some of the most obvious losers to miss a couple on purpose. 25 minutes into the session and we'd be done for the day.
For the most part, the people who took the class weren't stupid. Instead, they were drunks or stoners who didn't show up during the year enough to pass the regular class. Drunks and stoners like to be asleep at 8 am, not in class, so they would take the opportunity to try to catch some Z's at their desks. (continued below)
One of my classmates invented a game. Whenever someone had their head down on the desk, they would be a prime target for someone else to bring out a butane lighter and light it under the napping person's butt where it stuck through the chairback. The victim would not detect the heat immediately, and we would keep track of how many seconds until their reflexes finally kicked in and they jumped.
I'm going to predict the Professor's pocket welder would go unnoticed for around 28 seconds, or perhaps a little less if the person's reflexes were not dulled by mind-altering substances.
I'll add both posts to my list of reasons not to teach K-12. Thanks!
At least the teacher doesn't have to go home wearing burned pants. Of course, times have changed since then, so maybe you would be fair game now.
I went dancing with my wife, all these perfectly fine looking twenty something young women, all these cool dudes that were texting instead of dancing with them. My friend told me about the time he saw a couple at a meal in a restaurant never speaking, just texting. So it must be the testosterone absorption ray the professor has deployed around here. Oh and pinterest, that bugs me too. Honey want to play Sequence or Dr. Mario? No? How about we finish "No Strings Attached" then? Guess not then. You're online looking at what you never even knew you wanted to look at before you got there. Me, I have a bookmarks.html accessible via HTTP.
I'M ON THE ELEVATOR. YEAH, I'M STILL AT WORK. NO, I'M GONNA GRAB A COFFEE, THEN HAVE A SMOKE. YEP, I'LL SEE YOU AT FOUR…
/ you screamed in everyone's ear for that?
That's why cell jammers are so much fun……
Talking on your Blue tooth at work or in public.
[youtube PfJb1E3fnHs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfJb1E3fnHs youtube]
What gets up my nose is these people that write all of their blog posts on their toy phone, like it's some universal replacement for a proper computer and keyboard. What dreck they must be writing, to use such a thing. I'd never patronize a blog by someone like that.
-100 to you sir, and +101 to you also.
I agree. Which is why I post from my Hackintosh. Now, emailing, on the other hand…
I agree. Which is why I post from my PC which I readily admit is far superior to Apple branded products as I decided to build it in the first place and the only reason I call it a hackintosh is because I'm too mentally enfeebled to learn better operating systems. Now, emailing, on the other hand…
Fixed that for you.
"Better" operating systems? Like what? UNIX? It's got the command line if I need it. Linux? No software.
… yeah, that's pretty much it for options….
MacOSX is a Unix OS. It's got a crazy kernel setup that hasn't really done anything except slow it down, but it's Unix. (The Darwin kernel has gotten better over the years as they've improved the locking design, but I still think they'd have been better off starting with the FreeBSD kernel).
What do you mean "No Software"? I use Linux exclusively. It's got everything I use, and there is nothing on Windows or MacOSX that even vaguely tempts me.
Of course, if you really wanted a better OS, you'd fire up a copy of GNU/Hurd and glory in the future of all computing!
I've got a home media network so I can store movies and tv shows on a central server and watch them on any TV. That's probably 80% of what the Hackintosh gets used for. Linux was not even a possibility for that. I went with AppleTV's because they play nice with each other, and require no setup or maintenance. I investigated the other set-top boxes out there, but when I was buying, they were all horrendous garbage in comparison.
I guarantee you Linux is perfectly capable of all of that. I worked for a company that uses it as an embedded OS in the DVRs for a number of years. It may not be a "requires no setup" system, but it's entirely possible, and if I ever wanted a system like that, I'd do a roll-my-own with Linux and something like MythTV.
I have a personal hatred for "requires no setup" systems. I always find some use case the original designers never thought of, and their systems are never easily extended. My difficult-to-setup Linux systems, OTOH, are usually capable of absorbing my stupid ideas quite gracefully. Also they still end up being a zero maintenance system. Set it and forget it. Unlike the dreck that comes out of Redmond.
Don't get me wrong, enjoy your AppleTV setup. If it works and you like it, excellent. Use it. I'm a sysadmin and software engineer with a deep specialty in Linux. My current job is making a swarm of Linux servers run smoothly so that the rest of the company almost forgets they are there. I am deeply biased.
And that's exactly the difference. I've been building, tweaking, and customising Macs since the early 90's. I can make them sit up and dance; and I could probably have built something that would have worked from scratch — considered it a few times — but I wanted something my parents would be able to use when they came over, and something that would NOT require me to do an hour or two of debugging if there was a problem when I wanted to watch something. Your specialty is Linux; mine is Mac.But I think we can both agree: Windows is awful.
Yep. That is exactly the difference. My point was a very narrow "Linux Can Do It". Its software ecosystem is as diverse and capable as any other, but it does end up making me the computer world equivalent of That Guy™ who owns 10 BMC products with the hope that one will be running whenever he needs to get somewhere (BMC Wrenching Requirements => Linux Software Configuration Efforts). But it is never going to take over the world, no matter how many 17 year olds want it to (however, it is also not going to disappear ever, because there are enough of us to keep improving it or a successor). (I might have been one of those 17 year olds many years ago…)
Also, I do find MacOSX a comfortable second OS. It really is Unix, it has all the tools I expect to be there, even if better than 75% of their target market is never going to write a perl script, perl still there. And I am thankful for it (many of my co-workers run it, and it doesn't give me trouble, in the eventuality that it does, it will be a reasonable thing to deal with).
We definitely agree about Windows.
Bah, you can keep your freeware attempt at an OS and updated Xerox GUI. I'll stick with my os based on the stolen ideas of the updated Xerox GUI. We get together just fine and I've never had an issue that was software based since I got rid of Windows ME. Would you care to know why? Because I'm only functionally retarded.
Speaking of old fashioned tech, I need to give you a call.
So, if I have questions about utilizing WordPress on a non-iphone cell phone using a Dolphin browser I should address them directly to you?
Oh, by all means, please do. Do you own an arc welder and/or jumper cables? I have found that they are indispensable for the client when troubleshooting. With those, I can solve all of your problems.
I hate it when I'm texting while driving and the guy in front of me knows I'm texting but jams on his brakes so he doesn't run over some children and I run into him. Like, WTF dude?
I hate when I'm surfing the Internet in my 737 cockpit and I totally blow past Minneapolis and 150 idiots bitch at me like I'm supposed to care. I'm all, "I'm checking Atomic Toasters, yo."
I hate it when I'm texting someone and my boss comes up and is like, "your phone is ringing, aren't you going to answer it?" I gotta be all like, "yo b, I'm texin". Then some ol bitty complains to the news that her husband dies and she gets raped cuz the dispatcher didn't pick up. I'm like, who's fault is that?
specialist complaint:
Friends in various IT fields who chide when
one mentions problems with older pc's or
other tech. "You need to dump that old
box- it's over two years old!"
Look, beeeatch, we all don't have the
luxury of a corporate budget- I gotta make
this rig last as long as possible.
Even when I was employed, no way in
hell would I drop that kinda money every
coupla years.
See cheap vs well made(ie build your own)
discussion on other thread.
I'll agree. I have a background in it, but I enjoy running em til they blow up. The compaq I had ran hard for about 7 years and moderately for another 5. I finally retired it after I didn't have room for it this year. Was on all it's original parts, too. Running stuff for a long time is enjoyable to me.
+1
Not just computers. Anything I can run WAY past it's expected life is a win in my book.
That reminds me, the 190K nissan pickup is due for an electrical overhaul.