It is 6:26 AM on Sunday November 7th, 2021. Daylight savings time ends today. I had thought I’d woken up early and was glad since I would have plenty of morning peace time but then I realized my phone clock did not match up with the kitchen clocks. So we shall see how long the rest of the family will sleep today.
These remain very strange and surreal times. A good part of the country is under the influence of demagogues at Fox News and other right wing sources. These sources convince people not to get vaccinated against COVID and COVID has now surpassed the Spanish Flu in the death toll although numbers can be a bit deceiving.
This is all very sad and disappointing as I had always been under the impression that people were smarter than they are now proving to be. I had a generally positive feelings about people on the overall but given the events of the past two years that has turned negative and will probably remain the outlook for the rest of my life which is unfortunate.
It reminds me of a conversation I had with a father on my son’s school yard who happens to be a retiring cop who worked on the gang unit. He said “If there is anything I can impress upon my daughter it is that people generally suck.” In having some other friends who are police and taking a look at the police beat from time to time I can easily understand where they are coming from. This conversation took place two years ago and I disagreed responding that thinking that way is no way to go through life. I believed people were generally intelligent, smart and compassionate when it came down to it. Well, given Trump, the idiocy regarding vaccines, and half the country’s eagerness to latch on to conspiracy theories and the complete stupidity emanating hourly Fox News I now agree with the cop. I now have to tell my son that on the overall people are generally stupid, especially in times of change. Again, this is very unfortunate.
In another example I wrote a paper for my Japanese class about how America was the best country in the world. It wasn’t because I was a nationalist but because the students from other countries would always be attacking America. So I wrote my paper and the head professor told me to change the subject. I told him this was Japanese class and he should concentrate on my grammar, not my geopolitical opinions. He didn’t like that and thus failed me which meant I didn’t receive another Japanese language certificate from Waseda. I didn’t care as I already had one and my aim was to speak Japanese, not collect certificates.
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be able to write a paper like that today. I am shocked and saddened by those who are vigorously waving the flag today. These are people whose depth in patriotism is about as deep as their depth for supporting a baseball team. It is my team, I love it so much, it can do no wrong and if you don’t agree you should get out of MY country. I hate these people. They have co-opted the flag to their own ideas and opinions and if you do not agree then you’re not American.
All of this is so utterly stupid I’ve decided to opt-out. I’ve quit using Facebook, I’ve called out some friends and completely lost others. I try to limit my own news intake and am focusing on what I can control. This has lead to a big overall project in taking back my data and re-aligning how I use the internet completely. I am heavily into cryptocurrency, NFT and the projects that come with it.
To briefly explain what is going on, the Facebooks and Googles of the world give people a service, take their data and sell it. That was the model where the contributors never owned what they gave. Crypto/Blockchain/NFT is changing the model where one can actually own a piece of the application based on simply holding tokens, earning them through contributions, staking and other ways, and with NFT having an immutable record of their digital asset on the blockchain. To me this is all very fascinating and right up my alley.
I’ve been a computer nerd since 1993 and there have been ups and downs in overall excitement the last five to six years being quite boring online. The blockchain technology is changing everything and as exciting as the technology boom back in 2000. Social media was the exciting innovation a decade ago but it has become a toxic, stupid wasteland with its most recent iteration being Tik-Tok. Millions of people desperate for attention making videos of themselves doing stupid things. Sad.
As for my own internet activities everything now centers around my own server and I’ve been really making use of many more capabilities. Again, the main aim is to take back data and the first stop was the simple contacts list. I realized Facebook was the only way I could contact many of my acquaintances and I didn’t like that. So I downloaded as much as I could which was disappointing. Facebook is not generous when providing contact info as by design they want you on the platform, not putting in alternate means of contact. So even though one could put in telephone numbers, e-mails and websites, not many people do.
I use Synology and they have a nice contacts program. In addition with what I could get from Facebook I also have always kept a database with contact info although it was mostly used just to keep a record, not actually use as it is in Access so can only be used on Windows. I created a contact list in the Synology app and put in as much contact data as I could for everyone I’ve known and included their picture. The picture piece was important and took a long time. I then synced that server contact list with my phone and laptops. Now everything is nice and orderly and I simply need pull up my contacts app when I need to remember certain information such as kids names.
The sad part? I probably will never speak to 90% of the people on that list ever again. I’ve always kept my contacts and so the list contains many people I haven’t spoken with in decades. I’m also now middle aged and I’ve found most are not very good at responding. Most would respond to outreach on Facebook but even that platform garners mediocre responses these days. I thought that trying catch-up letters by e-mail would be fun but in the three former acquaintances I sent an e-mail to I got zero responses. These are people I’ve seen in the past five years and have even taken around San Francisco when they informed me they would be in town. I think I didn’t get responses for a couple of main reasons.
The first is people have forgotten how to communicate except by pressing like buttons or writing a few short sentences. The second is that we’re middle aged and those bonds of friendship or even acquaintanceship have faded. Furthermore, at middle age we have a lot of responsibilities such as kids that eat up every free moment. On the bright side there are two (out of my 569 Facebook “friends”) that did reach out by e-mail and I now have regular correspondence with.
In addition to my Contacts project I had two main others when it came to the server. I created my own calendars using the Synology calendar app. I now know when everybody’s birthday is without having to rely on Facebook. I want to lessen my dependence on internet services and my local NAS is the way to do it.
Finally, I touched on e-mail and am running an e-mail server. Setting it up was more difficult than I expected. Due to spam concerns e-mail is complicated! But I was determined as GoDaddy has yet again, taken away yet raised prices. No wonder their stock has done well over the years, seems like a simple model doesn’t it? Well, I wasn’t going to pay more and I have a ton of e-mails that I like to have but aren’t critical. These are the ones I use my e-mail server for and I’m happy to report I got it working. Now if PGE could offer stable power and Comcast stable internet everything would be perfect.
I’ve written much but wanted to get down what I’ve been up to. To summarize, I’m focusing inward, focusing on my immediate family while trying to lessen the noise from the culture wars and blatant attacks on Democracy from the right wing. I see that we’re in real political trouble and probably in for a real roller coaster with not only domestic affairs but the world on the overall. Republicans are actively trying to destroy democracy while China will eventually take over Taiwan and it looks like Russia will do the same with Ukraine. The volatility in the financial markets will be immense and amplify the confusion in an era where there is enough confusion and misinformation already. It is in these wild times I think decentralization, cryptocurrency and basically having assets and information sources, communication platforms outside of national and central company control will be very advantageous.
Just as we could not have imagined what our current environment looks like just a decade or two ago, I think we’re in for an even greater, and more rapid change in the future. Blockchain is a big key in that future and seems clear as day to me.
Case in point, it was only 10 years ago that parents were afraid of putting their child’s pictures on the internet due to lurking “bad people.” Well, now they won’t stop and include video now as well all for the sake of worthless internet likes! They trade exposure of their children for internet dopamine hits in their brain. Everything changes an in ways one wouldn’t expect.
As for blockchain it is still in its infancy. Let’s use e-mail to illustrate. To send an e-mail we simply need put in the address, type a message and press send. We do not need to put in an ip-address or manually look up a corresponding domain name to the right address in a directory. We just press send. With crypto in its current form we need to do a lot of technical things that would be scary to the mainstream. This is slowly changing where you can just see a picture or icon and click it to make things happen. The technical aspects will go behind the scenes and in the future most may not even know that what they are doing involves blockchain technology.
As for NFT, people wonder if this is a fad or not. In regards to digital trading cards I like to use this example. Imagine back in 1800s you told someone that soon there will be a child’s game (baseball) where grown men hit a ball and run around a kind of circle. You’ll be able to take photographs of these men, stick it on cardboard and these photographs on cardboard would be worth money! I think anyone who proposed this idea would be run out of the saloon. Yet here we are in a world where grown people wear jerseys of other men, who play children’s games and want to collect their cards. My son put it best when he said “people like to collect things.” It then occurred to me that this is what makes NFTs valuable. They are simply the digital version of collections and people like their collections. Therefore, NFT is the future, I’m certain of it.
I’ve written much, the family is now awake and the sun is shining bright. Time to get on with the day.
