"Who am I" in 3 Slogans
May 16, 2022 7:35:17 GMT -8
Post by Uncle Buddy on May 16, 2022 7:35:17 GMT -8
1. Forget GEDCOM, just share the whole tree.
2. Evidence--Assertion--Conclusion
3. If you don't build it, it won't work.
4. Work hard early.
OK, so I can't count.
Generally I am a lumper, not a splitter. When a useful generality does no harm, then it's useful whether or not it's perfect or complete. When splitting hairs and nitpicking and unending debate take the fun out of something, I don't feel this is very useful, because I think basically people take themselves too seriously, especially in America, where there is apparently a malignant seed within the average national mental outlook, since children are taking guns to school and mowing each other down and (don't get me started; I don't live there anymore).
I look upon genealogy as a fun hobby. I approach almost everything from an alternate viewpoint. I am free to change my mind without apologizing for it. I am just as free to state my opinion as if it were a fact, without apologizing for it. I am not ruined by over-education. I believe that what we call reality is a cover-up for the jillion interpretations of reality that we plaster on top of whatever reality actually is, so the assumption that there is one reality is understandable because it's comforting to think something can be proved, and the search for the truth is a great treasure hunt, but that game will never end and will never be more than a game. I guess that kinda makes me a Buddhist or something.
Here are some slogans which guide me in my sweet-and-sour stroll through life. And my life is whatever my hobby happens to be at any given time, which is currently an attempt to redefine what genealogy software should be like, by making some new genieware features & related realizations come to life. I am aware that the status quo in this field is just gonna get a chuckle from the existence of my project, if that, but my work is for the masses, not those who've clawed and struggled their way to the top of the Field of Genealogy.
Based on the above, you can probably see that it's not the end of my world if I'm wrong about everything. I generally find out, if I stay interested in something long enough, that I'm right on some key points which attract fervent opposition from vested interests. My ideas have to either gather support through their own usefulness, or wither and die, since I do a lousy job of selling myself. In fact, conversely to trying to sell myself, I consider self-deprecating humor to be a sign of intelligence, but heavily-detailed intellectual arguments to be a sign of rigidity covering up insecurity. There again, that's just my opinion, not anything I'd care to try and prove.
I believe that all emotion is a cover-up for fear, such as the fear of being wrong, and the fear of saying something stupid. A lot of emotional energy is behind trying to prove a point or gain dominance in a conversation. I'd rather have one good friend who disagrees with everything I say than a whole bunch of followers who I had to impress by convincing them that I'm right. That's a pack of sheep, what would I do with a follower if I had one? I couldn't give a rat's behind about "image" or appearing professional; the whole idea of trying to be a Sombody in My Field just makes me want to laugh till I puke. On one hand, I naturally care what you think of me, but this is a tendency in myself which I fight tooth and nail and constantly make fun of.
1. Forget GEDCOM, just share the whole tree.
We act as if (and speak as if) GEDCOM were a "standard" of genealogy. If this is so, then genealogy is in big trouble. Actually GEDCOM is a broken, worn-out, obsolete old tool that should be moved out of the workshed-out-back and into the Museum of Useless Things which Became Mistaken for Standards (MUTBAMS). I've registered many opinions about this in the section on GEDCOM. My opinions to me (since I'm me) seem so self-evident that I hesitate to say much more about GEDCOM till someone with more experience chimes in and tells me something I don't already know/think/believe/assume. Some alternate perspectives would help me hone or abandon my various opinions.
2. Evidence--Assertion--Conclusion
Currently, genieware most naturally assists in compiling a conclusion-based, superficial summary, so there are some folks wanting to make a new form of genieware that forces people to think hard about sources and evidence. My approach is to keep the folks who don't want to think hard, let them do it their way, and include, for those who care, a new way to bring in the evidence-based people which I call "the assertion as moderator between evidence and conclusion". There's an explanation of this on the home page at www.Treebard.com.
3. If you don't build it, it won't work.
I do not prepare well for things. I do not plan long enough to "succeed" in conventional ways or to win society's approval. I jump into things with great intensity, burn out, and find a new preoccupation. I am an Aries with Capricorn rising, which means my approach to things is to climb a ladder so I can jump off from halfway up. The climbing is as important to me as the eventual escape, but I don't expect anyone to be impressed by that. I'm a perfectionist trying not to care too much. If I lost you by mentioning astrology, let me go on to mention that Treebard includes a numerology tool. Why? It's fun. And sometimes more accurate than the census. I'm kidding. No I'm not.
I gave my life (or the career-building energy that I used for something else) to a research project on compressed air cars and related inventions. Having discovered and turned over to the public a source of solar energy that beats the pants off windmills and solar panels, I retired from this pursuit (see http://www.AirCarAccess.com) knowing that if my fervent and prolonged evangelistic drive had succeeded, the ability to run our cars on ambient heat would kill the planet the rest of the way, not save it as I'd intended in my idealistic youth. If we did have the free energy that so many air car inventors promised, the world would be paved over and turned into 1/3 shopping mall and 2/3 parking lot within ten years.
But besides topic fatigue after 30 years, the real reason I forced myself to stop thinking and talking about air cars with every breath was that it was too frustrating to theorize and theorize about something I could never afford to build. Once it became my motto that, "If you don't build it, it won't work," then naturally I had to go looking for something I could build. And that turned out to be a project comprised of doing background checks on those old-time wacko inventors who claimed they "could do the impossible, if someone would only just fund their research". So I guess they should have switched to genealogy too, because they all took their secrets to their grave.
4. Work Hard Early
In a retirement project (www.unworlding.com) which I temporarily stopped working on long enough to work 24/7 on Treebard instead, I used the pseudonym W. H. Early whose "higher self" was supposed to be called Whirly. Here is the source of this slogan.
As a wanderer in my early 20s (I'd announced my retirement at the age of 19), I was trying to figure out how to live on nothing, since I generally had nothing to live on and couldn't figure out how, as a nearly homeless person, I was supposed to get a job so I could pay rent, utilities, and own a car. I had training as a piano technician but the repair business wasn't a very good fit. I was raised by hoverparents who wouldn't let me make my own mistakes, so I tried to make up for that as a young energetic person. Now that I'm old and tired, I still have plenty of energy for anything I can do in a chair.
Anyhow, back in those early days as a neophyte human, I was looking into investing in a good sleeping bag since I couldn't afford a roof over my head, so I would wander into a hiking supplies store every once in a while. I recall two somewhat mundane experiences from those days.
The first experience: a sleeping bag salesman even younger than I took one look at my long hair and old clothes and expressed disbelief that I could afford one of his sleeping bags. Then he made me actually get in one of the sleeping bags to test it, and I got the impression he was making fun of me. I thought he was acting strangely and made a getaway. I imagined that he and his co-workers were laughing about my hesitance to get into the sleeping bag, which he knew I had no money to buy. I don't know why I remember this.
The second experience: the sleeping bag salesman was a 45-year old veteran with crewcut and the blocky, square countenance of a stereotypical movie drill sergeant. Based on his appearance vs. mine, I half expected him to laugh me out of the store, as if he could see into my empty wallet, if I even had one. But he was down-to-earth and courteous, and for some reason, he focused on teaching me how to stuff a sleeping bag into a stuff bag. I was thinking, you just stuff it in, right? For some reason he gave me careful instructions on doing this, and I quote: "You have to work hard early" in order to get a whole sleeping bag into that tiny nylon sack. For some reason, "work hard early" struck me in the heart and I never forgot this remark. It was so different from anything my dad would have ever said, who was too kind, too generous, too yielding, and never provided me with the strong male role model I might have unconsciously craved.
I have repeated this slogan to my foster son many times, but the Asian country I live in is a place of relaxed and happy people, a place where food falls out of trees 12 months out of the year, so when it comes right down to it, it's up to my son whether he ever "amounts to anything" in the American sense (see The Ant and the Grasshopper fable). Every day I thank goodness he's not in America dodging bullets and drug addicts. He is where he belongs. Within shouting distance of our house, everyone is a close relative, so he is secure and happy with himself. I've let him become more like his mother than like me. Since his great aunt married an American long ago and bought property to share with her extended family, my son literally owns a house and three very small farms, and doesn't know what a mortgage is. The educational system here is based on the failed educational system in America and it just plain doesn't work. I don't think it matters. We can't change it, so we're just playing along with it. In this country, you need a college degree to wait tables unless your uncle owns the restaurant.
There's a vague hope that the Treebard project will become a viable Showcase of Genieware Functionalities, and that it will outlive me, and attract donations for the assistance of the people of this rural village. We live in the house my wife was born in almost 60 years ago, and with the assistance of my parents who are in their 90s, we've replaced every stick of termite-eaten wood in the house over the years. It's too big for the three of us, because it was built for my wife and her 11 siblings to be raised in. I've now lived in the same house for going on 20 years, which is sort of incredible to anyone who knows me. I will never see the USA again, as far as I know. I travelled too much in my life, and have become allergic to it. I miss the Rocky Mountains where I was born and the Sierra Mountains where I fell in love with life when I was still undisillusioned enough to care whether I had friends and admirers.
Generally, the Treebard project is not about me, but this post is about the slogans that get me through the day, and my days are about creating Treebard, so this one is about me. Why? Because I had to go to town today, and I'm too tired to write code. My dogs will wake me at 5:00 in the morning and tomorrow will again be about Treebard.
2. Evidence--Assertion--Conclusion
3. If you don't build it, it won't work.
4. Work hard early.
OK, so I can't count.
Generally I am a lumper, not a splitter. When a useful generality does no harm, then it's useful whether or not it's perfect or complete. When splitting hairs and nitpicking and unending debate take the fun out of something, I don't feel this is very useful, because I think basically people take themselves too seriously, especially in America, where there is apparently a malignant seed within the average national mental outlook, since children are taking guns to school and mowing each other down and (don't get me started; I don't live there anymore).
I look upon genealogy as a fun hobby. I approach almost everything from an alternate viewpoint. I am free to change my mind without apologizing for it. I am just as free to state my opinion as if it were a fact, without apologizing for it. I am not ruined by over-education. I believe that what we call reality is a cover-up for the jillion interpretations of reality that we plaster on top of whatever reality actually is, so the assumption that there is one reality is understandable because it's comforting to think something can be proved, and the search for the truth is a great treasure hunt, but that game will never end and will never be more than a game. I guess that kinda makes me a Buddhist or something.
Here are some slogans which guide me in my sweet-and-sour stroll through life. And my life is whatever my hobby happens to be at any given time, which is currently an attempt to redefine what genealogy software should be like, by making some new genieware features & related realizations come to life. I am aware that the status quo in this field is just gonna get a chuckle from the existence of my project, if that, but my work is for the masses, not those who've clawed and struggled their way to the top of the Field of Genealogy.
Based on the above, you can probably see that it's not the end of my world if I'm wrong about everything. I generally find out, if I stay interested in something long enough, that I'm right on some key points which attract fervent opposition from vested interests. My ideas have to either gather support through their own usefulness, or wither and die, since I do a lousy job of selling myself. In fact, conversely to trying to sell myself, I consider self-deprecating humor to be a sign of intelligence, but heavily-detailed intellectual arguments to be a sign of rigidity covering up insecurity. There again, that's just my opinion, not anything I'd care to try and prove.
I believe that all emotion is a cover-up for fear, such as the fear of being wrong, and the fear of saying something stupid. A lot of emotional energy is behind trying to prove a point or gain dominance in a conversation. I'd rather have one good friend who disagrees with everything I say than a whole bunch of followers who I had to impress by convincing them that I'm right. That's a pack of sheep, what would I do with a follower if I had one? I couldn't give a rat's behind about "image" or appearing professional; the whole idea of trying to be a Sombody in My Field just makes me want to laugh till I puke. On one hand, I naturally care what you think of me, but this is a tendency in myself which I fight tooth and nail and constantly make fun of.
1. Forget GEDCOM, just share the whole tree.
We act as if (and speak as if) GEDCOM were a "standard" of genealogy. If this is so, then genealogy is in big trouble. Actually GEDCOM is a broken, worn-out, obsolete old tool that should be moved out of the workshed-out-back and into the Museum of Useless Things which Became Mistaken for Standards (MUTBAMS). I've registered many opinions about this in the section on GEDCOM. My opinions to me (since I'm me) seem so self-evident that I hesitate to say much more about GEDCOM till someone with more experience chimes in and tells me something I don't already know/think/believe/assume. Some alternate perspectives would help me hone or abandon my various opinions.
2. Evidence--Assertion--Conclusion
Currently, genieware most naturally assists in compiling a conclusion-based, superficial summary, so there are some folks wanting to make a new form of genieware that forces people to think hard about sources and evidence. My approach is to keep the folks who don't want to think hard, let them do it their way, and include, for those who care, a new way to bring in the evidence-based people which I call "the assertion as moderator between evidence and conclusion". There's an explanation of this on the home page at www.Treebard.com.
3. If you don't build it, it won't work.
I do not prepare well for things. I do not plan long enough to "succeed" in conventional ways or to win society's approval. I jump into things with great intensity, burn out, and find a new preoccupation. I am an Aries with Capricorn rising, which means my approach to things is to climb a ladder so I can jump off from halfway up. The climbing is as important to me as the eventual escape, but I don't expect anyone to be impressed by that. I'm a perfectionist trying not to care too much. If I lost you by mentioning astrology, let me go on to mention that Treebard includes a numerology tool. Why? It's fun. And sometimes more accurate than the census. I'm kidding. No I'm not.
I gave my life (or the career-building energy that I used for something else) to a research project on compressed air cars and related inventions. Having discovered and turned over to the public a source of solar energy that beats the pants off windmills and solar panels, I retired from this pursuit (see http://www.AirCarAccess.com) knowing that if my fervent and prolonged evangelistic drive had succeeded, the ability to run our cars on ambient heat would kill the planet the rest of the way, not save it as I'd intended in my idealistic youth. If we did have the free energy that so many air car inventors promised, the world would be paved over and turned into 1/3 shopping mall and 2/3 parking lot within ten years.
But besides topic fatigue after 30 years, the real reason I forced myself to stop thinking and talking about air cars with every breath was that it was too frustrating to theorize and theorize about something I could never afford to build. Once it became my motto that, "If you don't build it, it won't work," then naturally I had to go looking for something I could build. And that turned out to be a project comprised of doing background checks on those old-time wacko inventors who claimed they "could do the impossible, if someone would only just fund their research". So I guess they should have switched to genealogy too, because they all took their secrets to their grave.
4. Work Hard Early
In a retirement project (www.unworlding.com) which I temporarily stopped working on long enough to work 24/7 on Treebard instead, I used the pseudonym W. H. Early whose "higher self" was supposed to be called Whirly. Here is the source of this slogan.
As a wanderer in my early 20s (I'd announced my retirement at the age of 19), I was trying to figure out how to live on nothing, since I generally had nothing to live on and couldn't figure out how, as a nearly homeless person, I was supposed to get a job so I could pay rent, utilities, and own a car. I had training as a piano technician but the repair business wasn't a very good fit. I was raised by hoverparents who wouldn't let me make my own mistakes, so I tried to make up for that as a young energetic person. Now that I'm old and tired, I still have plenty of energy for anything I can do in a chair.
Anyhow, back in those early days as a neophyte human, I was looking into investing in a good sleeping bag since I couldn't afford a roof over my head, so I would wander into a hiking supplies store every once in a while. I recall two somewhat mundane experiences from those days.
The first experience: a sleeping bag salesman even younger than I took one look at my long hair and old clothes and expressed disbelief that I could afford one of his sleeping bags. Then he made me actually get in one of the sleeping bags to test it, and I got the impression he was making fun of me. I thought he was acting strangely and made a getaway. I imagined that he and his co-workers were laughing about my hesitance to get into the sleeping bag, which he knew I had no money to buy. I don't know why I remember this.
The second experience: the sleeping bag salesman was a 45-year old veteran with crewcut and the blocky, square countenance of a stereotypical movie drill sergeant. Based on his appearance vs. mine, I half expected him to laugh me out of the store, as if he could see into my empty wallet, if I even had one. But he was down-to-earth and courteous, and for some reason, he focused on teaching me how to stuff a sleeping bag into a stuff bag. I was thinking, you just stuff it in, right? For some reason he gave me careful instructions on doing this, and I quote: "You have to work hard early" in order to get a whole sleeping bag into that tiny nylon sack. For some reason, "work hard early" struck me in the heart and I never forgot this remark. It was so different from anything my dad would have ever said, who was too kind, too generous, too yielding, and never provided me with the strong male role model I might have unconsciously craved.
I have repeated this slogan to my foster son many times, but the Asian country I live in is a place of relaxed and happy people, a place where food falls out of trees 12 months out of the year, so when it comes right down to it, it's up to my son whether he ever "amounts to anything" in the American sense (see The Ant and the Grasshopper fable). Every day I thank goodness he's not in America dodging bullets and drug addicts. He is where he belongs. Within shouting distance of our house, everyone is a close relative, so he is secure and happy with himself. I've let him become more like his mother than like me. Since his great aunt married an American long ago and bought property to share with her extended family, my son literally owns a house and three very small farms, and doesn't know what a mortgage is. The educational system here is based on the failed educational system in America and it just plain doesn't work. I don't think it matters. We can't change it, so we're just playing along with it. In this country, you need a college degree to wait tables unless your uncle owns the restaurant.
There's a vague hope that the Treebard project will become a viable Showcase of Genieware Functionalities, and that it will outlive me, and attract donations for the assistance of the people of this rural village. We live in the house my wife was born in almost 60 years ago, and with the assistance of my parents who are in their 90s, we've replaced every stick of termite-eaten wood in the house over the years. It's too big for the three of us, because it was built for my wife and her 11 siblings to be raised in. I've now lived in the same house for going on 20 years, which is sort of incredible to anyone who knows me. I will never see the USA again, as far as I know. I travelled too much in my life, and have become allergic to it. I miss the Rocky Mountains where I was born and the Sierra Mountains where I fell in love with life when I was still undisillusioned enough to care whether I had friends and admirers.
Generally, the Treebard project is not about me, but this post is about the slogans that get me through the day, and my days are about creating Treebard, so this one is about me. Why? Because I had to go to town today, and I'm too tired to write code. My dogs will wake me at 5:00 in the morning and tomorrow will again be about Treebard.