study

Remaining Optimistic While Hurling Oneself Headlong Into the Dark Void

By Lars in blogging, Social, study, technology, wisdom, work No Comments Tags: , , ,

There’s a lot to get excited about when looking to the future, despite the gloom and doom the media pumps out at us. Last November, Steven Pinker released his “The Better Angels of Our Nature”, a 2+ inch thick tomb that lays to rest any doubt that the world is growing increasingly LESS violent over time. The reason you most likely haven’t heard of it is that it makes for the most horrible press one can imagine today (with December 21, 2012 fast approaching).

Mankind is enthralled to his basest of intuitions. Free will is an illusion. Any and all objections to this claim rely on innumerable compromises made against the latest research in the cognitive neurosciences. We place ourselves in a positive light not because we will it, but because we have no other choice. Our biology demands it. Despite such a fatalistic determinism, we possess all the tools we could ever need to determine our own fate. This is the source of my optimism. The future is unwritten.

I like to share ideas. Good ideas are exciting to me, regardless of whose they are, and that is why I am so driven to perfect my online publishing skills. Though I still struggle with my language composition skills, I remain wary of resorting to photos and illustrations to get my ideas across. The web is so much more than a photo gallery!

As I prepare to depart for a Geekdom member meeting, I wonder what concerns my fellow geeks there most. Do they seek a deep transformative experience in their peer exchange, or are they motivated more by seeking the ‘next big thing’?

Geekdom: first impressions

By Lars in Reviews, study, technology, work No Comments

Geekdom: first impressions

There’s a place in downtown San Antonio called Geekdom that looks pretty cool, so I went to check it out. Their website boasts a mission statement that starts with: “Geekdom is built on five immutable principles that have never been available in one place before. Call them “The 5 Pillars of Geekdom:” (worth reading)

Anyway, it’s on the 11th floor of a fancy-sorta hotel, which was odd, but once I walked in, I found it to be perfectly designed to make a geek feel at home. It’s like being in Austin. I’ve recently been hoping I could find a place filled with intelligent people who trade in code snippets and cool techie tricks without going back to college. (besides, I checked, and all they use is Adobe) I’ve been tinkering around with Firebug, MacRabbit’s Espresso and Github and reading all the cool articles on CSS-tricks, A List Apart and Smashing Magazine, yet I’m still not getting it. Maybe I need a community…

As I’m getting off the elevator, the first thing I see, besides the huge Geekdom wall graphics was a pool table with a bright red top. There was a conspicuous absence of a bulletin board, though, something you’d expect to see in any community-like center. I inquired and was told it’s coming soon. There was a lot of interesting activity around the commons area, and I was glad to see a few iMacs. Apparently the establishment is just getting off the ground at this point. We’ll see…

So why all the fuss with publishing this? Why not just fill in the form and be done with it? For a long time now I’ve thought that when one invests time and energy into writing something online, why not post on your own damn site first, then paste the relevant portions into theirs?

What languages (foreign or programming) do you know?

German
HTML
CSS

What other tech or business skills do you have (i.e. graphic design, UX/UI, marketing, entrepreneurship, etc…)?

graphic design
digital photography, from capture (studio) to post-processing (Aperture 3 and Ps CS4)
extensive knowledge of OS X
efficient in Windows 7, WiFi and cloud syncing
WordPress set-up and maintenance
human relations

What other interests do you have that are not tech related?

meme theory
cognitive neuroscience
linguistics
meditation
avant-garde cinema
bowl skateboarding
foreign culture
volunteerism
ping pong
Rockstar Games

What makes you so darn special?.

That’s a good one. **gee, I already feel special**

Okay, first of all, I’m really a fine artist, with a BFA from San Antonio Art Institute, where I studied painting and blacksmithing. I studied film at Bard College and German at the Goethe Institut in Berlin. In my twenties I was very sociable and eclectic, jumping from one art scene to the next. I still have many close ties to the arts community in SA, though now I’m married with kids (16 yrs), rely on hearing aids, and sing in men’s choir downtown.

While I’ve established a signature style (ink on clayboard) that I developed in the 90′s that still has a long life ahead, I’ve become less interested in the fancies and follies of the art world and increasingly drawn to the sciences.

Special? Hell yeah! But do you mean how geeky I am? Not technically. My brother Guy is the one with the CS degree. I may have completed calculus, but I can’t make heads or tails (yet) of that object-oriented programming/algorithmic stuff. In a general sense I guess I’m a geek, being a social misfit and constantly getting asked by people to solve their personal computing problems. Plus I’ve got some mean-ass keyboard skills and I’m fanatical about Web standards. How’s that?

What makes me darn special is I’m a passionate and creative geek who believes a culture can best improve itself when its members continually challenge conventional wisdom as well as openly share their best ideas and deepest convictions. The new rules of management, radical transparency, convergent media, the Filter Bubble, Anthropocene, or any hot topic covered by The Economist or WIRED, I’m totally on top of it.

I’m just deaf is all.

My iBooks bookshelf

By Lars in study, wisdom 1 Comment Tags:

This is a real quick, on-the-go mobile blog post here. Just thought I would share some of the (e)books that I’ve been reading. Usually I read them on the family iPad at home, but with the recent purchase of my first pair of reading glasses, I’m now able to comfortably read on my iPhone.

My books have played a huge role in forming my outlook on the world. Consequently, I intend on dedicating a portion of my blog to showering praise on those authors whose voices have won a high place in the chatter of my daydreams. It’s true that nonfiction writing has grown immensely in recent years, and I feel fortunate to live in a time to enjoy it.

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