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Responses to Ignorance

Here's some interesting news articles (click the links to follow);

A girl is killed because she's a goth.

An atheist soldier is harassed for being an atheist.

Responses to the atheist soldier article on a website which is predominantly atheist.

What do they have in common?

For me, they're a snapshot of how mixed up and messed up things are right now. It shows how people respond to what they don't understand.

But you know what, nobody looks at goths and says "I hate goths because I don't understand them' or 'I hate atheists because I don't know what they're about' or even 'I hate Christians because I don't get their faith'. Not at all, because I believe that what people actually think (if they think at all in these situations) is "I hate what they stand for" - in other words, the full body of ignorance is shown in that people think they know when in fact they don't.

People think that what they know about 'others' is what informs their actions, but the truth is that it's the gaps in their knowledge that really shows us what they're like.

There are three primary areas of responses to ignorance; positive, neutral and negative.

Let's look at the church's attitude to the belief that the world is round as an example and how those three would be manifest;

Positive

The world is round? Well, I never would have thought that. You learn something new every day eh? Well, thank you for that.

Neutral

So the world is round. What do I care?

Negative

Heretic! Burn him before he manages to spread his satanic lies!

I know, this is an incredibly naive post, but can we see the reflection our our own faces in the reactions of others around us?

The MOTs of Life

I've been thinking today about how I'm conscious at times of how we humans have a desire to look good, successful and respectable without actually wanting to be good, successful and respectable, usually because there's so much hassle, expense and effort.

Take the car's MOT. I've spent hundreds of pounds in the past so that my car can be counted as roadworthy for one day. As long as my car is good for that day, I'm good. I never stopped to think about the fact if my car needed new brakes, it's because I've been driving around in a death trap, a car with bad brakes. All I want is to have that certificate that says I'm good to go for another year.

The same applies to the driving test; how many people drive their cars with the care and attention with which they drove their cars on their driving test? Don't lie now!

As long as we can have the piece of paper or the 'trapping' that suggests we're good people doing good things in good ways for good reasons, we don't care if that's what we're actually doing.

I've worked for a company (not where I work now - in case by boss is reading this) where in order to earn an 'Investors in People' badge, everything had to be 'just so' for a couple of weeks. Once the award was given, everything went back to normal until the time to renew came along and we went through it all again.

Whether we're talking about tidy desk policies, appraisals, church efforts, big houses and posh cars or even politics, we all seem to want the gestures of greatness that show us in the best light possible.

But what about the little things?

If I made the effort to put my car through an MOT every week or month, it would cost time and money but I'd know that my car really was safe to drive. Ok, so that's a crazy illustration, but let's take it out a bit; A company that works for three weeks a year to get Investors In People isn't really an investor in people. A company that does daily everything that's needed for the certificate and therefore doesn't need the three weeks of frantic activity is a true investor in people.

So is it enough to do something every day? Not really, because if a company's idea of investing in people was to regularly put posters up to say that they're investing in people when in reality, they're just investing in the managers' golf fund, then they're not really investors in people. Are they?

What about 'churches' that want to be mega-churches and do it by playing rock music with bland lyrics, play DVDs recorded in churches half way across the world and invite self-help authors who also do shouty preaching (and every good Christian knows that the further a preacher has travelled, the better he is ;-)? After all, if you act like a mega-church, you'll become a mega-church. So if a whale acts like a cat, it will become a cat?

(I never did understand how these 'culturally relevant' churches can think they're addressing the culture needs of South Wales communities by becoming more American). Let's just say that ten people in a church that cares, loves, shares and worships from the heart is what I call a 'Mega-Church'.

Sure, go ahead and look like whatever you want, but the things that actually make you are the things that nobody sees. Pulling books out to make your mates think you're brainy won't make you brainy, reading them will.

Ok, sermon over ;-)

Carphone Warehouse Says: You should have accepted our spam if you want a rebate

Carphone Warehouse has kindly offered to refund £100 to those who bought an 8GB iPhone within a month of the price being dropped. I was among the number of these people, so I checked with the adorable company to check that I was going to get the refund.

Now, don't get me wrong. I see this refund as money-for-nothing since the price I paid is the price it cost and it's just my tough luck if I missed it. What I find interesting however is the criteria specified by Carphone Warehouse  for eligibility. The e-mail I received from Carphone Warehouse Customer Support stated the following;

In regards to this offer being offered relating to the Iphone there are 
the following terms and conditions.

- You must have purchased your Iphone at the higher price on or after 
the 17th March
- You must have provided permission for Direct Marketing and other 
information to be sent to you at the time when you purchased your 
Iphone.

(their spelling, my emphasis)

What this effectively tells me is that if I wanted to receive this rebate (which I didn't know what coming), I should have agreed to receiving Direct Marketing from Carphone Warehouse and Other Information.

I call that spam.

Betterware - Inspiration for Things That Suck

The other day, I got a catalogue from Betterware popped through the letterbox. Like every catalogue I receive, it got thrown away.

I got something else through the letterbox saying that they cam to pick up the Betterware catalogue and they're sorry they missed me.

Hang on a minute: They're expecting to come and pick it up!? But it's in the bin! If he wants it back, he can look in the bin. The bin is outside, he's outside so there shouldn't be a problem.

He left me a note saying 

"Sorry I missed you when I called today to collect your brochure/deliver your goods. I shall call again on Wed Afternoon. If this time is inconvenient and you wish to contact me, please call me on Paul"

If a complete stranger has the right to put something in my letterbox that looks like a physical manifestation of spam and expect me to read it and give it back, then surely someone somewhere on the well respected internet can demand with equal expectation that I will read the Viagra and Penis/Breast Extension e-mails I receive on an hourly basis and demand a reply!

That's not going to happen. It's my letterbox and I will do what I like with any unsolicited SPAM that comes through it.

Boy, Girl or Don't Want To Know?

I know that there are people who may be reading this and thinking that I'm talking about them when I say this stuff but you know that I'm not talking about you because you're different and you're not a bad person.

No, the bad people are the people who make some kind of 'one with nature' pact to not know the gender of their unborn baby. They're the ones who say "Oh, we don't want to know because it'll spoil the surprise" but what they really want to say is that they've got this kind of purity that means they're not going to allow doctors to tell them something that only nature should tell them.

It's like giving birth is something so sacred that they're too afraid to allow science to tell them something so natural. I'm not often on the side of scientists, but this time, I'm thinking it's just hypocritical to take this 'nature never meant for us to know until the birth' attitude when they're doing all sorts of other 'nature never meant...' things to the baby;

I'm sure nature never meant for ultrasonic waves to be bounced off the baby's bonce while yet unborn. I'm sure nature never meant for pickles and ice cream to be so readily available for those crazy cravings and I'm sure that nature never meant for it to have taken this long for you to have conceived anyway, unless that little rubber thing just fell off a tree and landed en penis with nobody noticing.

I get the Christians saying that they want to leave it to God. Don't get me wrong, I'm a Christian and I believe the Bible, but I also read in the Bible that whenever someone important was going to be born, God wasn't shy in saying what brand of human the baby was going to be. You didn't get angels and prophets saying "Behold, thou art with child but fear not, the surprise will be spoilêd not and I shall nay reveal unto the the gender of thy son.... .... D'oh!"

There's a whole bunch of things nature never meant for us to do yet we do it. We travel at 70 miles per hour down the motorway, we get space robots to tell us how to get to the shops and we use the internet to have face-to-face conversations with people on the other side of the world. So why not find out? As long as science isn't making minotaurs, go ahead and use what's there before the West blows itself up in a mixture of liberal oppression of common sense thinking.

May was well.

Evernote

Introduction

I've been using Evernote for a few days now and I thought I'd put a bit of effort into posting up a description of what it is. This isn't so much a review as it is a rave about how neat an application and service it is.

Put simply, Evernote allows you to store notes. Nice. But the power of the tool is in the kinds of notes it allows you to store, the ways in which it allows you to store them and the ways in which it allows you to retrieve them.

But where to start?

Notable Power

I could start by talking about how the notes are Rich Text so you can apply text formatting such as bold, italics and strikethrough. It also allows you to put photos or images into a note.

Now hang on a minute because this is one of the features of Evernote that blows me away. You see, when you store an image in Evernote, Evernote actually READS the image! What do I mean? Let me give you an example;

You're driving along and you see a sign that says 'Welcome to Oxford'. You like the sign so you take a photo of it with your cameraphone and send it straight to Evernote (more on that later).  So far so good yeah?

After a while, you want to find that photo you took in your Evernote list of notes. Now the thing is, there's probably little use in searching for the filename because it'll be something like IMAGE_00234.JPG or something. However, if you were to carry out a search on the word 'Oxford', the note containing the photo would appear because Evernote will have recognised the text and indexed it! Now that is sweet!

The way I've used it so far is by pasting into a note images from error boxes that have appeared in dialogue boxes. These images have been indexed so now I can search within my notes for references to that error message without ever having types out the message!

Another feature I like is the ability to put a check-box wherever I want one. What this means is that if I'm writing notes, I can place check-boxes within the notes as reminders that therein lies an action or a task that I need to complete. That is also extremely useful.

Your notes are stored on your computer but they can also be synchronised with the Evernote server. I find this particularly cool because that means I can use my Windows based PC in the office to take notes. Then, via the server, I have access to those same notes when I use the Mac OS X client at home. The notes don't have to be synchronised though and if I wish, I can set up notebooks which reside only on a local computer's hard drive.

Transmitting

You have a number of options as far as putting notes into Evernote is concerned;

• Desktop Client
  There is currently a full on desktop client for Windows (XP/Vista) and Mac OS X. These offer the full range of capabilities (The Mac client is catching up) so you can edit, arrange and tag with ease.
• Desktop Web Client
  The web gives you a simple and clean interface in which to create notes. The fact that it is web based means that you can access it anywhere, hence, you can get to your notes anywhere you have a desktop class web browser.
• Mobile Web Client / Windows Mobile Client
  There's a special and simplified mobile web based client if you're using a mobile phone or a Smartphone. If you have a Windows Mobile device (I hate that word, when people say 'device' for a phone, I get the feeling they're like grown men who can't admit that they still play with toys), then you have a native client that you can install and use locally. Apparently, they have a Mobile Java client coming soon and I would like to think that they've got a native client coming for Symbian and the iPhone.
• E-Mail
  Evernote gives each user a unique e-mail address so if you are taking notes in a mail client, you can just send that mail to Evernote and it is automatically stored in your notebook.
• Web Clip
  Whether you use Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari, you can use a special Web Clip bookmark to instantly store a web page or a highlighted part of a web page straight into Evernote.

I personally find this useful in the Notes application on my iPhone where once I've finished, I just e-mail the note to my Evernote account and it's there waiting for me to find it when I need it. The same goes for images which I take and e-mail them to Evernote. Also, since Evernote will have a stab at indexing handwriting, I'm can even snap a photo of my Moleskine and send that in!

Retrieval

There's no point storing notes if you can't get at them. As above, you can use a desktop client (Windows & Mac), a desktop web browser, a mobile web browser and a mobile client. There's also a system being developed where you will be able to access your notes via IMAP! Now that is a great idea and once they've got it sussed (my iPhone just doesn't want to know at the moment), that will be a killer facility.

The Desktop Client

Most of your time will probably be spent with the desktop client (mine is) and that's a tool that really offers some neat little functionality.

The Windows version is the more mature and you can see this with little extras like the activity monitor (a little calendar graph that shows you how busy you have been with creating and saving notes) but the OS X is coming up and is already very useful.

In The Name Of Freedom, Shut Up

There are many people crying out for freedom to say whatever they want. People want the right to  to call each other a schmuck or a bigot and if anybody dares shut them up, then they're Nazis or in bed with Robert Mugabe. Everybody wants the right to say whatever they want!

But when someone else comes and says something that enough people don't like, then it becomes a different matter altogether. You can speak your mind as long as you're not influenced by anything; as long as nothing has caused you to come to the belief you have, speak your mind. If something has caused you to come to the belief you have, then make sure it's a good thing like Kylie Minogue or a book that tell you how crap something is.

If you were brought up with religious values, make sure that the only thing you say is that those religious values screwed with your head or they forced your uncle to molest you. Don't, for heaven's sake, say that any religious values you were brought up with had a positive influence on you. If they did have a positive influence on you, make sure that you can show how it wasn't any mainstream part of that religion that influenced you for the better but a watered down secularisation of that religion so that you can still say that you were lucky to come out of that religious environment with an ounce of reason in your head and your pants on.

As long as what you say is what most people are thinking, you're free to say it. And if you're shouting someone down, make sure that your shouting is done for the freedom of others. Remember, you can hide your fear of someone else's ideas by making it clear to everybody that the very fact they have the opinions they have shows that they themselves are the cowards and therefore they should shut up.

Everybody has the right to say 'brave' things like the world is warming up. Damn the media for trying to shut you up in speaking your truths to the many, but woe betide any solitary voice who dares suggest that the world's warming up is not our fault. Such thoughts and ideas are too dangerous and misleading because now we know what the truth is (do we?) there's no reason to believe that anybody who deviates from the accepted truth is anything but an intellectual terrorist. That's why you'll see people failing to disagree and instead saying things like;

Christian groups challenge embryo research

Well of course they do…

Why can’t we just have a policy of rubberstamping the word “DISMISSED” across any suit filed in court by these people.

Nobody sets out to be evil or wrong, but we love to think of the 'other lot' like they're some kind of Dick Dastardly, desperately trying to find ways of making other people's lives difficult. If you want to see human embryos mixed with animals, I'm going to assume it's because you want to see a cure for some nasty diseases. If you think it's wrong, I'm going to assume you have a respect for human life and dignity.

Whether it's a religious nut or a scientific preacher of truth, everybody wants to speak but nobody wants to hear. Everybody wants to be the only one who has freedom of speech and it sucks. Whether it's a blog or a country, you'll find people trying to shut up the ones who challenge their truth while making a virtue of challenging others'

But you know something? This is nothing new. Nothing ever changes and although fashions come and go, you'll find that humans will always find a way to screw up a good thing.