David W. Boles' RelationShaping

Sniffing Out Sweetheart Site Hosting Deals

2008-05-14T14:32:12Z

Today, I want to warn you about Sweetheart Website hosting deals that you may not know about, or fully understand. Those backroom deals may unwittingly influence your buying decisions.

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You can usually recognize a Sweetheart Hosting deal by the always-mandatory logo of the hosting company in the blog or website sidebar or footer. How many regular people that pay their own way willingly put that logo or bug in their sidebar or footer for free? Not many.

If you see the web hosting company's logo on a private site's public pages -- usually with a specific hotlink to a specialized tracking URL -- you need to immediately question any recommendation the author of the site is making in favor of that "sponsor" and the sponsor's unpublished, but still tendrilic, relationships.

When site publishers have sponsored site deals, they are speaking to you with a vested interest in favoring their host and not in favor of getting you the best deal or in giving you the most disinterested advice. That makes sense, right? That's why these deals are hidden and hushed up.

A few site owners place disclaimers on their site revealing their vested interests -- but those disclaimers are not always easy to find and sometimes the language is contorted when they say they were "not paid to write the article" or post the page and other nonsense that isn't really true.

The unpopular question we must all ask as innocent and disinterested readers of these sites is, "Are you paying the full public pricing for your hosting and bandwidth, or is someone, or something, giving it to you for free, or at a reduced price? If so, what are you getting out of it and what do you owe them?"

Sweetheart Deals are everywhere -- so always be wary of what you read and keep your guard up when seeking recommendations from any website or blog. Those with vested monetary interests are purposefully not always made clear to you.

I have had many offers for sponsored site deals over the last 15 years, and I've turned them all down. I find it is always better to pay your own way and keep your independent voice intact, your integrity undiminished, and your spirit undeniably un-owed anybody at any time.

I enjoy writing and publishing without prejudice or third-party vested interest influence. I celebrate my own stuff in my sidebars and I always pay my own way for everything on all my blogs and network of websites -- and you can take that to the bank and cash it!

Violent Imagination Shaping Brain Reality

2008-05-12T12:23:31Z

Does perceiving violent acts -- real or imagined -- change the shape of your brain and how it processes information? The blunt -- and likely unpopular -- answer is, "Yes."

]]> A new study confirms that experiencing real violence -- and even processing violence-as-entertainment -- taints the brain and changes your personality and talents:

Anyone who doubts the malleability of the adult brain should consider a startling piece of research conducted at Harvard Medical School.
There, a group of adult volunteers, none of whom could previously play the piano, were split into three groups.

The first group were taken into a room with a piano and given intensive piano practise for five days. The second group were taken into an identical room with an identical piano - but had nothing to do with the instrument at all.

And the third group were taken into an identical room with an identical piano and were then told that for the next five days they had to just imagine they were practising piano exercises.

The resultant brain scans were extraordinary. Not surprisingly, the brains of those who simply sat in the same room as the piano hadn't changed at all.

Equally unsurprising was the fact that those who had performed the piano exercises saw marked structural changes in the area of the brain associated with finger movement.

But what was truly astonishing was that the group who had merely imagined doing the piano exercises saw changes in brain structure that were almost as pronounced as those that had actually had lessons.
"The power of imagination" is not a metaphor, it seems; it's real, and has a physical basis in your brain.

One can no longer argue gory movies, neighborhood killings and violent video games do not re-shape the brain in bad and terrifying ways.

One need not kill in order to perceive the effects of murder on the body by the brain -- and that is a harsh and bitter reality for us to accept when so willfully immerse our children in a culture of violence and celebrated bad behavior.

If we instead chose to fill our brains with only love and respect for each other -- imagined or not -- how fast could we create real change in the world for the betterment of us all?

Memeingful Online Learning

2008-05-10T12:10:22Z

Taking the classroom online not only re-forms relationships and ways of knowing -- distance learning also creates memeingful teacher and student dyads that can be stronger apart than when collected in the same physical classroom.

]]> Hardcore ASL now offers a variety of online learning, tutoring and fluency evaluation for mastering American Sign Language.

In addition to our traditional online portal where you can use text messages, milestones, chat and To Do Lists to communicate and learn, we also offer interactive tutoring and teaching using online video chat clients like Skype and iChat.

Using real-time video to learn a visual language like ASL has incredible benefits and now it no longer matters where in the world you live -- you can now take online American Sign Language courses with the best instructors in the world who are waiting at your fingertips to be invoked into service.

The Peril of a Mechanical Pencil

2008-05-07T12:10:31Z

The modern world made a sea change when the wood pencil was replaced by a mechanical one -- and what was lost in that industrial design exchange was our tether to the land, a sense of impermanence, and a shared yearning for renewable resources.

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Where once the wood pencil was something to be measured and grasped as its point dulled from use and its length only shortened in the refining of the lead, and then graphite, tip; now, with the rise of the mechanical pencil, we no longer see embedded tooth marks of ownership in the body or smell in our noses the unforgettable cedar smoke ground out by the gears of a pencil sharpener.

Mechanization removes history by replacing the itinerant with the permanent.

A wood pencil brings us back to our national roots and renews the pioneer spirit: We were all once made of trees and covered in ochre and tin tipped with a pink rubber eraser.

A mechanical pencil -- with its evangelical, everlasting, point and hard-polished metal body and millennial plastic ends -- is made to root out the now and dominate the future.

In that battery of past memory for the emotional instant -- we become weaker in ourselves and in the natural genetics of an ongoing evolution that used to live in the palm of our hands.

The Danger of Trading Essence for Experience

2008-05-05T11:48:54Z

Today we live in danger of surviving only in essences and not experiences.

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The disconnect between reality and essence is made most brilliant, and less divine, in the online ether that surrounds, and pretends to replace, the reality of experiences.

When we trade essence for experience, we endanger our species because we are forced to guess about reality and facts and truths through third-party, temporary, online experiences with invisible people.

We are then easily able to create our own reality and direct our own set of moral standards that, above all, serve our own selfish interests.

Transient relationships become real while established, real, and permanent relationships are committed to the avarice of shared memory.

Technology makes it simple to create your own reality that skews the truth of the world.

You only connect socially to those that share your own interests; you can design your own homepage portal to reflect only the news you want to read; you allow only certain people to become your friends. This is a cocooning from which there is no escape into the wilds.

There is greatness in a universality of experience that is lost in the eternal ether of the internet.

When we are not forced to get along with those we do not like; we have no talent for negotiation or sense of reasonableness or need to compromise -- we have no idea what's happening in the rest of the world because we haven't bothered to add news sources that differ from our preferences; and our myopic values and brittle morals are never challenged into bending because we have created circles inside circles to form a protective shell that coats us from the bitter cold of a variety of realities that would frighten us if we were ever aware of them in the first place.

Only when reality hits us -- and shatters our shells -- will we begin to live in freedom and die in the fresh air of human responsibility.

Separating Semaphores from Semiotics

2008-04-30T14:17:14Z

We love a Semiotic world where images can have a variety of meanings and influences depending on the eye perceiving the message.

We also live in a Semaphoric world where specific images have a specific, non-negotiable, meaning that cannot, and must not, be open to individual interpretation. In the image below, those flags, in that exact position, mean "Romeo" or "R" and if you don't understand that Semaphore, you are unable to communicate or be understood.

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That dangerous presumption -- that everything is open to interpretation and re-definition -- is where we begin to crumble as a human dynasty.

Semaphores are, and must always remain, indisputable human facts; while Semiotics can be factual or fanciful or fictionalized.

Semaphores and Semiotics are not synonymous -- and the languid mind tends to blur the line between definition and function and blends those polar opposites into a single meaning that leads to a disastrous aftereffect.

Trapped by Proprietary Technology

2008-04-28T14:31:34Z

Beware of the curse of proprietary technology!

]]> learned from direct experience that using any sort of non-universal technology or web code can create large problems for you later.

If you blog, make sure you aren't using any proprietary code to call a movie or an audio file, because if you change blogging platforms you will certainly break that code and lose functionality for your website.

I was smart to always host my images on my own server. That way, if I changed webhosts or blogging software, all my image links remained intact.

However, I was not smart enough to resist Emoticons and embedded YouTube code -- and all of those calls to the technology were broken in transition.

As I clean up my messy, leftover, blogging code, I suggest hotlinking all content. Hotlinks are forever. Proprietary code is not.

Hotlinks mean your reader can click on the link for more entertainment and then decide the how and when of their interaction.

Why embed a YouTube video if you can send a reader directly to YouTube?

Emoticons, while fun, can become a crutch for hilarity -- and when they're gone, they leave behind bad, and frankly, sad trails of what used to be and what used to work.

Death of the Old God

2008-04-24T11:56:55Z

The great American Playwright Eugene O'Neill said, in the early 1900's:

"The greatest challenge to mankind over the next century will be the failure of science and technology to replace the death of the old God."

]]> Eugene O'Neill's warning was never more prescient or foreboding than the recent scientific news revealing there isn't much pressing hope in ever finding an AIDS vaccine:

Most scientists involved in Aids research believe that a vaccine against HIV is further away than ever and some have admitted that effective immunisation against the virus may never be possible, according to an unprecedented poll conducted by The Independent.
A mood of deep pessimism has spread among the international community of Aids scientists after the failure of a trial of a promising vaccine at the end of last year. It just was the latest in a series of setbacks in the 25-year struggle to develop an HIV vaccine.
The Independent's survey of more than 35 leading Aids scientists in Britain and the United States found that just two were now more optimistic about the prospects for an HIV vaccine than they were a year ago; only four said they were more optimistic now than they were five years ago.
Nearly two thirds believed that an HIV vaccine will not be developed within the next 10 years and some of them said that it may take at least 20 more years of research before a vaccine can be used to protect people either from infection or the onset of Aids.

When the power to create a life is also the weapon used to end a life, we know the old God is laughing at our feeble, and non-humble, attempt to thwart the mysteries and the power of the body.

We may be able to pinch the God particle, but we are, in the end, left alone to fend off death and infection and the viruses that infect and kill us.

Instead of looking up to the heavens for inspiration from The Gods -- we, as the Human Race -- rolled our eyes downward and into ourselves and inside our computers and we asked science and technology to save us from the inevitable.

Instead of leading righteous, external, lives that would serve us well in the end, we chose learning over belief to find escape clauses and emergency exits that science and technology teased -- but never really delivered -- and so we are now left humbled, yearning, and hoping for salvation from ourselves, and from each other, because we realize now, but only when it's too late, that killing our old God is empty and forever.

Pinching the God Particle for Profit

2008-04-22T12:30:26Z

Science has pinched God!

]]> essence of God in the universe using, of all things, the scientific method of proof:

The 40-year hunt for the holy grail of physics - the elusive "God particle" that is supposed to give matter its mass - is almost over, according to the leading scientist who first came up with the theory.
Peter Higgs, whose work gave his name to the elusive Higgs boson particle, said that he was more than 90 per cent certain it would be found within the next few years.
The Higgs boson was the professor's elegant 1964 solution to one of the great problems with the standard model of physics - how matter has mass and thus exists in a form that allows it to make stars, planets and people. He proposed that the universe is pervaded by an invisible field of bosons that consist of mass but little else.
As particles move through this field, bosons effectively stick to some of them, making them more massive, while leaving others to pass unhindered. Photons, light particles that have no mass, are not affected by the Higgs field at all.

Are we about to touch God?

How soon will this essence of God be pinched for profit for the benefit of the rich and famous?

Or will the downtrodden and the misbegotten finally be full-particle beneficiaries in a universe that has, so far, disowned them?

Will they, at long last, be offered the healing hand of the God Particle from the palm of science and technology as they are lifted from the core of human suffering and into the warm light of a brighter world?

Saving Private Soldier Sperm

2008-04-19T14:44:11Z

War not only ravages the body. War savages the family. War kills the future. War assassinates the now. A soldier's widow was forced by the United States Military to not only fight for her right to her dead husband's sperm, but she was also pressed to dig into the muck and mire of a rigid military system that was unkind to the living remnants of a fallen body. Kynesha Dhanoolal won the battle, but lost her war.

]]> sperm taken from his lifeless body so she might be able to still bear his child even though he was dead.

On Friday, a federal judge in Columbus, Ga., granted her request for a temporary restraining order preventing the military from embalming the body until samples of Dhanoolal's sperm were extracted.

The samples were taken later that day and are in the custody of a medical representative for the widow, who is hoping to be inseminated even though fertility experts said the procedure almost certainly would not work with her late husband's sperm.

"It's not viable," Dr. Andrew McCullough, associate professor at the New York University School of Medicine, said Monday. Sperm maintain nearly normal movement and some function for the first three hours after a man's death. After that, their movement and viability declines, according to the Web site for the department of urology at Cornell University's Joan and Sanford I.

Weill Medical College. Dr. John Park, a fertility expert and assistant professor at Emory University School of Medicine, said there have been reports of viable sperm being retrieved up to 36 hours after a man's death. But he said it is "highly unlikely" any viable sperm could be retrieved four days later.

Was Kynesha brave, or foolhardy, to fight the military system to win back her fallen husband's sperm?

Should the dead be allowed to create children?

Is there selfishness in living when death is cheated?

Is the natural -- and necessary -- turbid ebb and flow of human misery threatened when, because of science and technology, the dead become the righteous living and the living die fighting for the rights of the dead?

The Suicide Heart and Craving Chicken

2008-04-14T11:26:39Z

Are we only our DNA? Or is there more to us than just blood and guts? Can the essence of us live beyond our lives and into the horizon of others?

Two recent stories about The Suicide Heart and a Craving for Fried Chicken lead us into the realm of the uncanny.

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The suicide heart of one man was implanted into another man who then committed suicide 12 years after marrying the donor's wife:

No foul play was suspected in 69-year-old Sonny Graham's death at his Vidalia, Ga., home, investigators said. He was found Tuesday in a utility building in his backyard with a single shotgun wound to the throat, said Greg Harvey, a special agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Graham, who was director of the Heritage golf tournament at Sea Pines from 1979 to 1983, was on the verge of congestive heart failure in 1995 when he got a call that a heart was available in Charleston.

That heart was from Terry Cottle, 33, who had shot himself, Berkeley County Coroner Glenn Rhoad said.

Is suicide intellectual or biological?

Can one rogue heart infect another with suicidal tendencies?

Here's the amazing story of a woman who received the heart of a young man and began to share his personality and food cravings:

Now that I could eat like a normal person, I found, bizarrely, I'd developed a sudden fondness for certain foods I hadn't liked before: Snickers bars, green peppers, Kentucky Fried Chicken takeaway.
As time went on, a strange question crept into my mind. Although I hadn't thought much about my donor, I was acutely aware that I was living with a man's heart - and I wondered whether it was conceivable that this male heart might affect me sexually.
Until the transplant, I had spent most of my adult life either in a relationship with a man or hoping to be in one.
But after the operation, while I still felt attracted to men, I didn't feel that same need to have a boyfriend.
I was freer and more independent than before - as if I had taken on a more masculine outlook.
My personality was changing, too, and becoming more masculine.

Are our cravings, passions and intentions stored in the muscle memories of our hearts?

Is it possible to reform a murderer by replacing that bad heart with one of a good Samaritan?

Will kind hearts go for a higher price than evil ones?

Will heart DNA be used as gene therapy for future soldiers to encourage them to kill while in service and then, when they return to civilian life, will their hearts be re-adjusted to care and love instead of standing and fighting?

Mouspad Droppings and the Wood Scar

2008-04-12T16:37:39Z

I have a beautiful, old, writing desk I use all day every day.

Notice I said "writing desk" and not "computer desk" because there's a big, scarring, difference between the two that you shall soon learn.

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A computer desk is lower than a writing desk, it is more condensed, and you type on it as the mission of its function.

Before I had my computer desk, I made the error of putting my computer stuff on my writing desk and that was a decision I still look back on and wonder upon today: Why, oh why?

A writing desk, I learned, it a little to high to comfortably type on because the center drawer bangs against your thighs and presses your entire body away from the keyboard.

A computer desk has no drawers.

Several years ago, I bought one of those fancy and, new-at-the-time, gel mousepads that I plunked down on my writing desk in the humid dead of an East Coast Summer.

Years later, when I decided to move my computer stuff to my new computer desk, the gel mousepad refused to leave the writing desk.

Not one to take any snippiness from my technology, I grabbed the mousepad by its decomposing gel edge ears and ripped it away from my ancient writing desk!

The mousepad droppings left behind were composed of a primordial ooze of decomposing gel and a watery patina of what used to be my lacquer finish and raw, exposed, wood.

My gel mousepad ate away my writing desk!

My anger immediately turned to dismay as I realized the ancient finish on my writing desk was finished with a permanent gel marring the facade.

Many years have passed since that episode and that gel residue -- my wood scar -- is still there, deep and growling back at me.

I haven't been able to find an appropriate salve for the exposed wood. Anything I use to try to remove the damage only increases the damage.

Now I use that scar as my hated space. If I have a hot coffee cup with no coaster in sight, the cup goes on the scar. Is my water glass weeping sweat? Onto the scar it goes. Are my fingers sticky from placating a runny nose without a tissue? Wipe them on the scar.

Slowly, the scar is taking on some character and shading as I pick at it every day.

If a scar is never allowed to heal, are we ever allowed to forget its creation?

I suppose that's my secret hope -- to keep that scar living and raw until a proper wood surgeon can be found to restore the entire desktop and heal the tree of me that a rogue mousepad, and a faraway mind, failed to protect from infection.

Proof of Life: Dying to Blog

2008-04-09T13:40:09Z

You and I know blogging is a job -- and a genetic obsession -- and now, thanks to The New York Times, everyone else knows blogging is killing us all.

]]> Here's April 6, 2008 The New York Times article:

SAN FRANCISCO -- They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece -- not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.
A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.
Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

I wrote about this blogger burnout phenomenon on March 28, 2008 in my -- Out of the Ashes -- article:

There's nothing wrong with burning out. It eventually happens to every personal blog by the very nature of the beast we are exposing -- the questions then become: Do you retire your blog, do something else, or do you just keep your blog on life support as it slowly dies from your self-inflicted neglect?

I get the sense most people have a year's worth of really important personal things to share -- that's 365 blog posts -- and anything beyond that is either yabbering to fill space and time or a determined change in the direction of the blog that moves it from the world of personal reflections and bounces into the larger, reflexive, world of iteration and public exposure. Some people write those 365 blog posts in six months and burnout -- others write less frequently and burnout the 365 over a few years.

People who blog have obsessive personalities because they realize what few in the world ever acknowledge: Publication is proof of life, evidence of accomplishment, and on-the-record preservation of a life lived -- along with a Google forbearance against immortality.

Does it matter we're giving up our good health and our strong hearts to nefarious publishing platforms?

No, because that is the purpose of living and the intent of dying. We can stop at any time -- but we continue to move our fingers to connect our thoughts to words.

Writing is the ongoing propagation of dreams into the virtual forward and never-ending future.

Who would want to miss that opportunity to be heard beyond their voice and to be seen afar from the reach of their eye?

If there is a verifiable heartbreak cracking across the "blogosphere" -- it is happening not in us -- but within those that love us despite our unflinching dedication to the keyboard and the dancing pixels we manipulate with a wink and a touchpad.

We'll all die trying to fill a bottomless cup to overflowing even though that task costs us more blood and bone than Sisyphus' entire boulder rolling career.

We blog because we must... not because we want to...

Disposable People

2008-04-08T13:00:48Z

We are all disposable. The longer we live, the closer we move to the trash bin.

As we age, and become less than we were, technology strives to keep us alive, to help the heart keep pumping and to keep the skeletal architecture of us strong and the impulse of our muscle twitching.

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Why do we want medicine and technology to extend our lives if the quality of that life is only one of hanging on and holding out? Do we judge that quality of life, or do our caregivers do it for us?

When did the essence of life become more important than the living?

Instead of making our elders the wise center of our families, we store them away in nursing homes and in long-term care facilities where they are cared for by strangers and not those who love them.

We stockpile the elderly because it is easier for us to live our own lives than to wallow in their creeping deaths.

We now live longer to only become lonelier and many of us are not strong enough of mind and willing enough of spirit to singularly go it alone in the twilight of our final days and that creates an unimaginable horror within us all.

Scientists claim there is no reason our bodies can't survive to the age of 200 years old.

I ask: "Why would anyone want to bother living beyond 90 if we are only kept alive by wires, tubes, medication and a yearning for the life of youth once enjoyed?"

The Blogging Pain of Moving Parts

2008-04-04T22:20:03Z

There is nothing worse in the world than moving a blog from one publishing platform to another.

I am presently oozing pain and suffering rivulets of blood loss today as my Urban Semiotic blog suffers against a threatening weekend of technical support inaction and un-styled blog content and borked URLs.

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I have be re-shaped, maimed, and re-formed into a giant ball of fleshy goo. I am human. Mostly. I bleed. Eternally.

Yet, still, we wait -- with light hearts and hope-filled eyes -- that Movable Type or pair Networks or some other good-hearted stranger, will happen upon us and shine in our darkness with their light of technical support and .htaccess.

Don't wait up with us.