Monday, July 14, 2008

Stray Thoughts...

...upon finally getting home after bringing my mother to a hospital for a blood test.

If living a long time means getting old and feeble, I can't see where its that good a deal. We think 'getting old' means being one of the photo shoot models for the retirement communities -- the guy is grinning, full head of lightly grey hair, holding a putter or tennis racquet, the woman is grinning, brilliantly grey hair, in a relaxed, cosmopolitan setting. They never show walkers, wheelchairs, breathers, any of that.

When you go to leave a comment on a web site where there's already fifty or so, do you read any of them? Do you read all of them? I do the first, not the second. So, why do we comment? Is it the acceptable equivilent of graffitti? CeruleanBill Waz Here!!! Might be helpful to have a 'composite' comment -- The general sense of these comments is.....with most people saying the following things. I bet that would be difficult to program.

R
eading an article in Time magazine -- I had a lot of time at the hospital -- about crossbreeds of design teams and business people coming up with new, fast, edgy, insightful (insert gasp-inducing damn-I-gotta-have-that adjective here) ways of getting to market, I wonder: is it for real? Or is it like the reason that things getting written up, usually -- it isn't common, its novel, lets write about it. Not to say its not useful, but how do you get it to the mainstream without losing the touch of magic that made it remarkable?

2 comments:

Lone Chatelaine said...

You're so right about the aging thing. I never see anyone who is sick with leukemia like my Mom. I can't even imagine how it would be to be that dangerously sick and be alone, but it frightens the hell out of me.

On commenting: Depending on the topic, I sometimes do read all the comments, and then never comment myself. I figure I couldn't make a difference anyway.

Cerulean Bill said...

Makes assisted suicide something thats not quite as heinous as before, I'd bet...

As for the commenting -- sometimes I will read articles about Natural Language Processing, and I think Hey, ths is cool, I could get into this. And then I realize I am about fifteen significant levels of understanding away from being able to do anything with it.