Posted in society/culture/news, technology at 12:59 pm by Josh Peters
If you didn’t already know, Microsoft will be launching a new music player called “the Zune” in November. The guy who heads up the project is Jay Allard, the man behind the XBox 360.
Similar to the 360, the Zune will allow the use of Microsoft Points to purchase songs.
It wasn’t too big of a deal (to me) when they started it with the 360, but it’s pretty impressive: Microsoft has created a currency.
I sincerely hope they keep this experiment up and offer the ability to purchase Windows Vista via Points. Since the Department of Justice pretty much allows them to get away with crazy stuff like this, they may as well push it to the limit. Attention Visa, MasterCard and PayPal: get in on this and legitimize it.
Permalink
Posted in God/spirituality, identity at 4:15 pm by Josh Peters
If you haven’t read part one go do so, I’ve got an ego to maintain 
As I said earlier I was to teach on Confrontation. I had prepared my teaching earlier in the week, but decided to make two huge changes to the teaching due to some of the things I was learning about.
After the first night’s workshop I checked into a hotel to crash work on my teaching. I decided to begin and end with a story explaining how confronting someone properly actually does what EMI says it will do: communicate love. The story was one of me helping my friend Jerry, but I won’t share it here (there’s a lot to talk about and it I don’t feel like typing too much more at 1:32am on Sunday morning). The kinesthetic exercise I decided upon would be having my group pair off (that the Lord we had an even number of people!) and take turns proclaiming that when we argue “I am right and I will win.” The exercise was designed to make the hearer (in EMI-speak the “seeker”) feel defensive. To contrast and to demonstrate the goal of a confrontation balancing truth and love I asked the same pairs to repeat “I want you to be right and I want you to win.” Not exactly opposite statements and there can be a lot said about the word choice but the goal was to communicate by the speaker (EMI-speak: “helper”) a desire to not engage someone’s “defensiveness” mode of operation.
When 7:00 am came (which is 6:00 am in Central Standard Time) I was feeling exactly the way I had the morning before: “I don’t wanna go to EMI today, I just wanna curl up in this bed and forget about everything.” I didn’t prepare as much as I probably should have, but wrote it off to a belief I have about believing in the material and letting my heart speak.
Of course feeling ill-prepared I volunteered to go first 
In my world, setting the standard is always a good thing, especially when others top you later.
One thing I neglected to account for was how long the group activity would take to setup. That cost me valuable time from my presentation; I had to skip two out of the nine cards I prepared due to a lack of time. That stunk. I had three main points to communicate, and in the middle of point one I saw the two minute warning. I finished well, and was able to quickly choose what material to skip without taking away too much from the teaching itself.
The peer review that followed (while watching the tape) was quite positive. Of course my nervousness showed, and one of the main comments I took away was “RELAX!”
After all four of us had our chance to teach and be reviewed we broke for lunch. The afternoon consisted of some light lecture with a workshop of role-playing. As a group we were taught how to properly set up a role-playing exercise (I was sad I didn’t bring my dice).
There are three keys to executing a good role-playing exercise:
- Setting up: a clear statement of what is being demonstrated sets the audience up. A vague hint can also be useful, but you can only use this as a teaser, not an excuse to be vague. Be sure to set the scene so the audience doesn’t have to waste their time figuring out who’s who and what happening.
- Actually role-playing: demonstrating a skill through a short drama can prove quite useful.
- Summary: ask the class questions about what they saw; ask the actors what they felt. Both will help to make sure your points got across.
After the role-playing exercise we pretty much wrapped up the weekend. We all received small monkeys to take back with us (EMI uses the monkey as a symbol of people’s burdens: you’re not to offload your monkey onto someone else, nor allow someone else to offload their monkey onto you–but you can help).
The trip back was a nice change from the trip to. As I entered Indiana I was passed by a van. The driver was lighting a cigarette. About two minutes later (and some leap-frogging) he passed me again and I noticed he kicked up a lot of moisture as he did. Nope, not moisture: it was smoke. His hazards came on and his smoking van quickly pulled over to the side of the road. I’m sure he just pushed his vehicle too hard, but I couldn’t help but wonder if this guy set fire to his carpet…
On a final note, some of you know I like to sing along to songs when I drive somewhere, especially when the drive is a long one. Friends, there exists a category of songs that men should be careful about singing, for they make you sound terribly gay. Son of a Preacher Man is one of these songs. But I’ll be damned if it isn’t a fun song to sing.
Permalink
Posted in apple/mac/ipod at 2:09 pm by Josh Peters
News around the net is Apple’s getting legalistic about using “pod”. This really stinks. Apple’s stating to crack down on people who use the term “pod” (which is a terribly generic word) in their names. It’s a shame that it takes success for Apple to do this, as I seriously doubt that many people would have been too concerned about the term “pod” when the iPod first hit.
Once “podcasting” came out Apple did nothing to C&D then, they embraced the term. Now it seems they’ve flip-flopped. What’s next Apple, berating people for the stupid lower-case “i” that you put in front of so many things?
What a crappy way to pay back your fans.
Permalink
Posted in technology, work at 11:36 am by Josh Peters
Yesterday I completed work on a task that I’ve been ducking at work for about a month: combining all of our software repositories into one, big repo. Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
Posted in PSA at 2:37 pm by Josh Peters
Bruce Schneier blogs about an interesting method to ensure your luggage isn’t misplaced by having it considered a weapon. Frank, if you read this, please let me know what you think about it.
Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized, math, technology at 12:16 am by Josh Peters
This is a post I’ve been meaning to write.
The Guardian reports on how Gavyn Davies used statistical probability to determine estimate how many tanks the Germans built during World War II.
This article really fascinated me–it’s interesting to see how mathematics is used during wartime. Mathematics is a powerful tool that is easily used for good and evil purposes.
One thing I notice is how mathematics is closely linked with intelligence gathering. In this case, since we couldn’t spy on the Germans effectively an alternative method was devised to determine their ranks. Today, the National Security Agency uses mathematics for far more sophisticated means, but the goals they accomplish are typically the same: gather as much information as possible and put it to use. There is a huge amount of power in information, and its true that we live in an information age.
Social networking is a fun way to keep track with friends, but it also is an easy way to digitially encode your life. From following my blog one can determine my political views (within an acceptable tolerance) and determine my friends. From there, knowing those two things they can cross-reference and have a good guess at my friends’ political beliefs, based on their comments to my posts, or their own posts, etc. From there someone may pick up on the fact that I am a Mac user.
Through voodoo and careful tracking, one may discover that my Mac-ness and political beliefs are typical for people my age. One may perhaps further extrapolate the data of thousands of people similar to me to determine that major political announcements that would anger me and my kind should be announced during important Mac days, such as the MacWorld Expo, or the WorldWide Developer’s Conference. This may allow for embarassing news to slip under the radar of thousands of complainers.
The scenario I describe may sound contrived, but it’s really not too unrealistic. For example, Wal-Mart knows that people buy Pop-Tarts® and beer right before major hurricanes. They respond to this mathematical mapping by sending more supplies to stores ahead of time whenever a storm is looming.
Math is powerful and scary. Be careful what you put out there about yourself. You never can tell when it will come back to haunt you.
Permalink
Posted in flamebait, politics/government, privacy/secrecy/security at 12:02 am by Josh Peters
I don’t think that Alberto Gonzales is a trustworthy guy. Now he wants ISPs to keep records of ‘net usage for years. This has so many potentials for misuse its ridiculous. If we continue to give in to the Executive branch’s increasing demands we encourage them to continue to bully us with their fear tactics.
Child pornography is a deplorable, horrible act that causes harm to minors. I’m not debating that. Yes, child pornography is a growing concern but let us not overreact to it by eliminating privacy by giving our government more power than it needs.
And terrorism has become such a broken record it’s not even funny. Our leaders keep looking for ways to eliminate terrorism, win this bogus war on terror (note: wars against ideologies aren’t real wars–editor), protect our borders, but they ignore intelligence reports telling them that our occupation of Iraq causes more terrorism than it prevents. And the party line when confronted with such reports: “I haven’t read it yet.” How is this an excuse to not answer questions?
Giving up search logs and other private data to the federal government does little more than allow them to connect points in the social spy network the NSA keeps. Maybe if the Bush administration actually caught Osama bin Laden instead of saying stupid things like “he’s not really on my mind,” we could believe their claims of actually being interested in preventing terrorism.
I’d rather run the risk of child pornography growing and terrorist attacks in America than give this administration any more rope to hang us with. The only thing they’ve proven since the re-election is how quickly they rush to spy on their own people and blame media outlets (that try to keep them accountable) for their troubles.
(As an aside I was feeling quite hopeful that Google’s safesearch: command would do its job as I looked around for statistics–it did a mediocre job returning zero results. Better safe than sorry.)
Permalink
Posted in funny, movies, toys/games at 1:48 am by Josh Peters
Jenni discovered a great video of people acting-out Final Fantasy.
I’m so impressed. I love how the automatic rifle misses at point-blank range. Even the length of the battle (which takes way too long) really reflected Final Fantasy quite well.
Permalink
Posted in God/spirituality, gross, health, introspection at 1:26 am by Josh Peters
This weekend I attended EMI’s Intensive Teacher Training. One of my personal goals is to become fully certified so that I can run a full weekend seminar on communication skills and how they can make or break relationships. I’ve personally benefitted a great deal from the principles taught by EMI and really believe in sharing those as much as I can. Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
Posted in movies, society/culture/news, technology, web at 12:55 am by Josh Peters
A monopsony is sort of an inverted monopoly, concerning a huge customer who can assert their will due to their huge influence. Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »
