Meandering Thoughts on Saturday: Gardening, Pictures and O-Net: Vision, Purpose

I often laugh about the fact that the most popular things I write have been written after staying up all night - things which amuse me more than anyone else, perhaps, but still they are somewhat popular and I don't know why. I don't think that I write better in this state - because I did stay up all night last night - I think that people just like me when I meander a bit from the norm. It's probably why The Free Egg and Open Chicken Argument: Why There Is an Open Source Community. And Stuff In Between has been so popular.

There's a point to this post and no matter what happens in between, remember that. Remind me if you have to, but remember that there is a point.

Omidyar.net

I signed up a while back with Omidyar.net, and have been logging in maybe once per day. Honestly, I don't know what to think of it.

I'm a programmer, and someone who has been using computers before AOL had it's first credit card incident. I feel like a dinosaur saying I was around before Netscape, but I was. You kids out there who can't say that, well, you have it good so don't ever whine to me about it. I used to have to login uphill twice every day just to get abused on Usenet. Still, I'm pretty good at keeping up with technology. I'm not the best, but I've found that chasing technology is sort of like chasing the opposite sex (or the gender that suits you) - some you stop chasing because you are afraid that you will not only catch them, but that you'll be married to them.

Omidyar.net reminds me of marriage for some reason. It's not a criticism; I'm not married and I don't know that it's good or bad - but I do know that marriage takes commitment, and O-Net - which it is fondly called - appears to take some commitment. Normally, on things like Orkut, LinkedIn, and any number of 'social software' sites, I get the hang of things really quickly. Perhaps it's because those sites, despite themselves, are focused. LinkedIn is about professional contacts, Orkut is about trying to be cool and sexy. O-Net, well, I don't know. I know some people use it for workspaces.

But I know how to create my own workspace, and don't need to use something else that's alien. I had load 5 pages just to post a message to the introduction board, and I said that there should be a '>>|' so people can get to the last post. That initiated a discussion that I wasn't mentioned in (though I brought it up), and which created more posts so that someone will post on the 21st page instead of the 20th page. The formatting isn't HTML or BBCode, it's something else.... with no real benefit from the changes that I see. But O-Net is probably near or at critical mass, so changing it would cause problems. It's just another form of markup, of course, but it adds to the whole, "OK, I'm here, what now?" sort of thing which keeps people at long arms length. Maybe if I was working on something with an O-Net crew, I might see something differently, but to me... it's just another messageboard with karma and a bank.

I tried to post a message at the request of someone the other day. I couldn't, and it didn't say that I couldn't - there was just no magic button/link for me to do it. So I emailed the person who made the request, and they responded that I probably had to join the community to post. OK. But which community? The top level one, or all the bottom ones? O-Net has a really flexible taxonomy for creating subdivisions, but geez... it's hard to say which ones I want to join. Maybe I just need to get used to it. Who knows. What I do know is right now, it doesn't seem to do anything for me, so investing time in it seems like a sinkhole. Maybe I'll wake up one morning and it will all make sense. I don't know.

Picture, Backgrounds

After staying up all night, as should be expected, the sun came up. It came up in a new way, as it does every day. So I took some pictures, and ended up playing with light a bit. In my sleep deprived state, I think I got some good ones - sort of like hacking code all night and then unhacking it for 2 days. But then a thought came to me which probably doesn't seem obvious to many of you readers. Yes, you can use the large images as desktops, as long as you don't try to sell them to anyone. I don't know about you, but I felt kind of silly.

So feel free to browse my photos - I set mine to the image on the upper left. Go crazy, free desktops! When you find an image you like on Flickr, click 'all sizes' above it, and you'll be taken to the large size. Right click on it, save it, and select it as your desktop on your machine.

If you need further instructions, send a self addressed stamped email.

Gardening

I'm a closet gardener who came out of the closet with this sentence. One of the things I've always found relaxing is making things the way I see them, and while I'm often called a techie person, it extends into all parts of my life. What is different to some is the rate. My father never understood why I waited on some things in the yard. He'd get upset if the weeds got too high in the back, but his solution was ripping everything out with a weedwhacker or a cutlass. Actually, if the house wasn't in the middle of it, he would have been quite happy with slash and burn.

The thing is that there is a hill in the back yard. The road in the back is higher than the top of the back door. The incline, on average, varies between 45 and 85 degrees. When you rip everything out of there, or cut everything with something that operates in a violent manner, you lose plants that are holding the hill. Slowly, I would plant grass and pull weeds so that eventually the grass wins and holds down the earth, while the tree roots from those planted hold the deeper ground. Ladies of the Night and what may be Mock-orange trees, which my father and I called limonella (which it isn't!), a lime tree, a guava tree, a sour cherry tree, the old mango tree and the quickly growing Sacred Fig trees are in the back, with whatever else the wind blows up.

Gardening for me is a matter of doing small things every day. I don't wander around the yard all day - but I'll focus on a part of it every day. At night, this is a problem, but as the sun crests the horizon, light pours onto the yard. The yard is full of surprises. A few days ago, I found a lime tree that I transplanted to another part of the yard. The cinammon trees, about 2 years old now, are about my height (not much). And the thyme that I've spread throughout the yard is growing everywhere.

Purpose and Vision

So there's a point I told you to remind me about. OK, here it is. Everything is about moving toward a vision. If there is no vision, there is no purpose and if there is no purpose, and if there's no purpose then there is no reason for any action. Some things happen faster, some slower, some never happen. In the latter case, one has to adjust the vision to suit. Even the ant has purpose. The ant, especially, has purpose, but the ant is limited because the visible ant works a low end job and dies. A human has the ability to be changed by purpose; an ant, after millenia of evolution, is specialized and has become the product of that specialization.

Knowing what to take, as in gardening, is just as important as knowing what to give. Sometimes you get lucky and find something, like a lime tree or cinammon tree, but most of the time you find weeds. You can cut the weeds all you want, but you never really get rid of them until you pull them out with their roots. Sometimes, like my relationship with O-Net, you don't know what the larger plant will look like so you let it grow to see what it becomes. If it fits the vision, you keep it, if it doesn't, you sharpen the axe and erase it from the vision.

Sometimes if you leave the weeds alone, you find out some are useful. Without purpose, they would not exist, and without a vision with them in it, there would be no purpose. That borders dangerously close to religion, but it's not religion - it's been claimed by religion, but it was so before religion. It was so before mankind. And in and of itself, that vision is not something we can stop, but something we can adapt because we also have purpose, and vision. We can fight over vision, but we take energy from accomplishing that vision by fighting about it. A garden of the same plant is boring, and would make a horrible park.

But a collection of gardens is pretty interesting. If an idea cannot recurse, a purpose cannot recurse, a vision cannot recurse... well, that's not much of a vision at all. It leaves nothing to work toward.

A glass is always full, even if it is full of empty it is full of empty. It's the glass itself that defines shape - inside and outside - not the contents. We're malleable. We can hold a shallow depth or a great depth; the volume is probably the same. What leaks from deeper glasses goes into shallower glasses; the question though is more difficult than all of this - the question is, 'What fills the deeper glasses?'

The answer is vision. Distilled in the deeper glasses, it overflows into the more shallow glasses and, done right, fills them. The only thing that can displace that vision is a more viscous vision. Facts are like solid objects that sink and displace fluid so that the vision cascades further. But when a glass is filled and overflowing with a viscous fluid, more viscous than the other, the vision runs off with the excess of the other vision. Sooner or later, everything swims in the vision, and on the surface the less viscous liquids are seen - shiney, and subject to evaporation. Below, slowly, the more viscous fluid permeates.

The deeper the vision, the less you see on the surface - and the more that is happening below that you cannot see. That's my addled point for today.

I should sleep or get more coffee.