While I doubt anyone reading this will understand this post, I am putting it here for posterity because within 10 seconds of submitting it to E2 it was downvoted, and within 30 seconds (count ’em) it was killed. Sigh. Not sure what I was trying to prove, but I thought it was good, consolidated advice, and obviously TPTB didn’t. (Because I’ve removed the E2 hard links, some things don’t make as much sense)

It is an old adage of the internet — before contributing to a place, you must lurk, learn, and understand. This is called learning by example, and it is not something you should do here.

As Everything has developed, it has become much more complex, and, possibly, more hostile. There are many things that you, the newbie noder will see so often that you will take it as evidence that it is allowed, but it is not. Here are a few pointers (yes there are more and many, but here are the ones I didn’t find in time):

• Don’t node about noding
  
  This node for an example. I, as a current level one, have no business, in the eyes of the e2 community, noding about what one should be noding about. Therefore, I will receive many downvotes. This is an example of what not to do. Ever. In the FAQ it might say you generally should avoid this. That is not true. You must always avoid this.

• Don’t capitalize titles
  
  This node for example. You learn through school and life that A Title Is Capitalized. Not on Everything it ain’t! Capitalize the first word, capitalize nothing else. Don’t use a period, don’t use all caps. Yes, people do it. Those are people who are allowed to do it. If you do it, you get bitchslapped.

• Never, ever, ever mention one of your nodes in the chatterbox
  
  This node for example. Even if a dozen people have /msged you asking for clarification, even if the chatterbox is filled with discussion of your node, don’t you dare link to it or even mention its title. This is called nodevertising and it is bad. Even though the FAQ and the writeup say that it is alright on occasion, they are wrong. It is not.

• Don’t ever link to non-existant nodeshells
  
  This link for example. It doesn’t take you anywhere, therefore it is not useful. You won’t know this when writing your writeup, so you have to go back and fix these things immediately when you find them out.

• Never complain or even mention downvotes
  
  You might be angry, you might be legitimately interested, you might be curious or want to learn. Doesn’t matter. People vote, they don’t explain why, and you just have to deal with it.

• Never give up
  
  I might sound like I hate e2, or I am frustrated. I’m not. Don’t give up. Any meaningful community has a high barrier to entry, that is what makes it so powerful. Communities are always suspicious, wary, even outright hostile towards newcomers and outsiders. Tough it out, give it time, and eventually they will come to accept you as one of their own.

One final word of advice: People are much more vicious in public than in person. Often times /msging someone with a non-confrontational question or reply means the difference between anger and simple disagreement. The content editors and gods got to where they are for a reason. You may disagree with them, but try not to aggrevate them. They can be your best friends and allies.

If I were ever allowed to post this again (which I never will be), I would probably change the ending.

Where is the candidate who asks: Must we sell our soul to win this “war”? Where is the political party that demands respect for principles that I thought were fundamental. If we must detain Arabs, must we do so inhumanely? If we must frisk every air traveler, can’t we at least build in checks to the system to assure that it is not abused? If we must fight to defend America, can it at least be America that we defend?

So says Lawrence Lessig in a short, heart-felt post about American politics.

I think I want to follow him and travel abroad. In fact, i think every American needs to get out of this country for a year and see a few others, preferably a couple in Asia, South American, and the Middle East.

I’ll be putting up a classy new site design soon, complete with lots of XHTML and CSS for those who care, although I don’t pretend to be making it truly “accessible”

In the meantime, I figured I should link to another funny event. This one I’ve linked to before, but I think it needs to be seen again. This is Jim Fingal (a guy I knew in middle school) and his Harvard pals behaving in…well…Harvard-ly ways. Just check it out.

Read Tim Minear (the co-exec producer)’s recollections on the end of Firefly. Very poignant. Quote:

When an actor, usually a guest actor, finishes his or her last scene in an episode, that is what happens. The AD (assistant director) announces, “That’s an episode wrap for so-and-so.”

Doesn’t happen with regulars.

But it did today.

Dear English Teachers –

I try to be a good little student. I try to adhere to your guidelines. Even though I am no longer in high school, I try to avoid contractions and avoid sentence fragments. I attempt to connect my lists with commas, and keep the comma before the “and” even though newspapers tell me not to do so. However, some of your rules just do not apply in real life. For instance, starting a sentence with “for instance” or “however” or “but” is not bad. Nor is it wrong to attempt prettier prose by occasionally flouting standard rules of diction. Most importantly, you absolutely must stop with this silly business about “five-paragraph essays.”

What is the purpose of the “body paragraph?” Allow me to speculate that this structural convention is an attempt to clearly seperate thoughts and ideas into blocks. You are attempting to teach students how to structure their thoughts for maximum effectiveness, and thus the strict code of introduction, quote, analysis, transition, and the like. Certainly this format is appropriate for two or three page essays about one book. It is appropriate when a student is attempting to convey three major ideas with textual evidence. But there are many places when this format is not appropriate.

You may notice that I end each of my paragraphs with a “hook” or “transition” into the next paragraph. Then I launch into the next paragraph with additional explanation leading to a primary point; upon reaching said, I move on to the next paragraph. This format is good and appropriate because it allows both the writer and reader to clearly deliniate disparate thoughts and ideas. The eye is not tired by one long stream of text. The reader can easily jump to an appropriate section. The addition of section headers makes this navigation even easier. This is the new way of writing.

The internet is the new way of publishing. Hundreds of thousands of people keep online journals called “weblogs.” Millions post in online forums, message boards, and chat rooms. Millions more use instant messages to communicate in real time. All of these formats rely on concise bursts of ideas clearly deliniated. In short, these mediums rely on a style completely opposite to your standard five-paragraph essay.

The consequences are clear and widespread. People either rebel against the rules of grammar entirely by refusing to capitalize and use correct punctuation or they attempt to confine their online posts to your standard format. Only those who have learned differently (either through college education, by reading, or another method) can break this nasty habit. And those people are forced to endure the stupidy of a format not meant for this world.

When in life will people write essays and reports in five-paragraph form? Never in business, and rairly in academia. I have never found a college professor who demands a five-paragraph essay. I have never found a book, article, report, or study written as one. I have, however, seen online postings where paragraphs go on for pages, where there is no clear break between ideas, where obligatory quotes to useless information are thrown in because people think they should be.

This format is extremely detrimental to a new digital society that is not only prevalent but is saturated into our culture!

By all means, keep your format. Teach the five-paragraph essay. But while you’re at it, teach students to write in the same format as they read. For once, teach them to use apostrophe, instead of just reading it. Teach the writing of poetry. For goodness sake, teach them how to write basic prose!

For the good of all humankind, do this for us. Teach students that literary analysis has a purpose, but it is not the only way to write. It is not even the standard way to write — in fact, it is a method of writing that is very narrowly defined and generally not used in the real world. It is good for teaching the structure of argument, but it is only one tool among many.

If you disagree with me, take your typical news analysis and combine it into five neat paragraphs. See if you can do it, and then see if its more readable than before.

Next, try a dissertation.

Sincerely,

Danny Silverman

P.S. – You really do spend a lot of time obsessing about line spacing and margin widths as opposed to actual content. Why is that?

I noticed that the wonderful Brin article was taken from a longer piece that he published on his web site. I ran a diff and found out that this longer version contains two or three sections that deal with the development of Western culture without any talk of Tolkien, which could by why Salon excluded them. The font and style make the longer version harder to read, but the inclusions make the article better, so I’ll point to that one as well. (Don’t bother reading both, they’re mostly the same!)

David Brin writes:

For the life of me, I cannot picture more than one truly optimistic portrayal of future society in all of TV or film sci-fi. With the sole exception of “Star Trek,” most of the SF we’ve viewed in the last 40 years has been relentlessly critical of perceived technological or social trends. Far from utopian, these films have served us well by dramatizing potential failures. To coin a term, they have been self-preventing prophecies, helping us work out our fears and exploring dark possibilities.

His missive on Tolkien is one of the best articles I have ever read.

Might as well mention that I just saw Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and it was incredibly awesome, better than the last one. Everyone else will be saying similar things, figured I might as well do it here too.

Sally sent me this one from the Onion. It’s good:

WASHINGTON, DC—Flanked by key members of Congress and his administration, President Bush approved Monday a streamlined version of the Bill of Rights that pares its 10 original amendments down to a “tight, no-nonsense” six.

Bill of Rights Pared Down To A Manageable Six

“Atoms are like people. get lots of them together, never know what they’ll do.”

Following up on Microsoft’s recent move to purchase evil from Satan, Santa Clause is looking into moving his entire North Pole operation over to the Linux operating system, says this report.

Bold move, Santa!

Here is something I posted on Slashdot, bad spelling, grammar mistakes, and all. The topic is Linux standardization and suggestions of finding common ways of doing things, which some people take to mean one standard window manager, one way to install programs, etc.:

No one needs to convince me, they need to help me (Score:3, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 15, @04:24AM (#4891015)

There are a helluva lot of comments of the vein, “if you don’t want to learn Linux, stay away.” It is obvious to some but not many of us here that the problem is not that people don’t want to use Linux, it is that they want to be able to USE Linux. As a relatively new Linux user (although I’ve used a lot of Nix tools in Mac OS X) I find it incredibly frustrating that oftentimes I want to do something in the CLI, I have no idea how, and I don’t even know where to start looking. Friends tell me commands to run like they should be obvious, but how would I know them except by being told? And I absolutely hate it when I want to, say, change my resolution and I have no idea how and a friend refuses to help me because he knows how to do it in Red Hat and Mandrake but he’s never used Debian and he doesn’t know nor care to know the “Debian way.”

The posts about “lowest common denominator” are right now, and here is an example. When you want to change the host name of your machine, you run the command “hostname” as root followed by the new name. Ta dah, its set. This works, as far as I know, on all Linux distros. On Mac OS X, you use the hostname command, and it doesn’t stick on reboots. Why? Because the Mac uses a differnt configuration file and its not documented under man hostname.

What do I want as standards? I want you to be able to add new ways of doing things, with new features and better usability and nicer functionality, but I still want my old commands to work, even if their deprecated. Or at least point me in the right direction.

That is what “standardization” means to me…a unified method of handling user interaction. I don’t care if you use Gnome or KDE, I just want to be able to access all my apps from each. I don’t care what you write your programs in, I just want to be able to use keyboard shortcuts for “cut” and “paste” and “save” that are the same. I just want my window themes to apply. I just want the widgets to look the way I set them. I just want the “Okay” button to always be on the right. Or the left. Whatever.

Please, standardize. Look at the Apple Human Interface Guilelines, and make something better, something that projects and apps can put a sticker on their website proudly saying, “I’m usable!”

That’s all I, a Linux newbie, ask.

There are still some among us (okay, a majority of the American people) who don’t understand why the others of us don’t like the Bush administration. Ariannah Huffington spelled it out in the clearest way possible.

Read that, and then ask me again why I don’t like President Bush and his cronies.

The episode of Firefly, “War Stories” really didn’t do it for me. Not even close to as powerful as Ariel…too much sex, too much violence, no fun or plot. Eh.

I slept < 6 hrs. on Tuesday night/Wednesday as I prepared for my JOUR final and wrote my last essay for that class, which, by the way I've posted online in PDF and raw LaTeX form (first one this year that I’ve gotten around to putting up!). So I aced that final, then was in the strange situation of falling asleep at 5:30 PM and waking up at 11ish…then falling asleep again at 5:30AM and waking up at noon. Total sleep > 12 hrs. Time spent studying for Mary Davis’s (really hard) AMST 100a final? 2 Hours. Grade on said final? Terrible, I’m sure. Sigh, sigh, sigh. I did great in journalism and turned in a good paper at the expense of a class I was already doing worse in. If I’d have stayed awake as I planned and put in another 5 or 6 hours of studying Davis material, I could have done decently well on that exam. But my excessive need for sleep put me at a disadvantage…again.

One test and one essay done, no problem (and the essay is my first in L^AT_EX, so that was fun)

Three more essays, one more test, one more day. Ick.

To do: essay on why T_EX is good and Word is bad.

Addendum: Apache’s spelling module is really nice. More people should use it. Seriously.

I started playing the Fame soundtrack on my computer, a soundtrack that I downloaded legally from EMusic.com a couple years ago. This led me to the EMusic site, which hasn’t changed much from its (perfectly functional) old design. From this I followed a link to MP3.com, which is completely redesigned (finally, although sadly they’ve changed their logo yet again, for no good reason)…and from that I checked out the hardware reviews.

Why am I writing this again? Ah, yes. I worked at MP3.com last summer, and one of the things they actually let me to (as opposed to promising and then forgetting about) was write reviews of new products. Soon after I got into the swing of things, my boss was laid off, and they really didn’t like my reviews anyway (I was…how do you say? Ah yes, negative. Honest, I’d say. They’d say negative.) So anyway, my reviews are still online, and you might be suprised with the amount of vitrol emanating from those pages of the otherwise-cheery MP3.com site. This review in particular I really like, as the product was really very very bad, but I kept emphasising that it was good while at the same time dissing it at every turn.

For kicks, you can compare my (wonderfully written) review with their review of the first version of the product, a suck-up review if I’ve ever seen one.

That (non-me) review is symptematic of the whole problem with MP3.com. It quickly turned from its vision of the water company of music, a monopoly conglomeration of all music in the known universe in an easly-usable system that could be tapped by every program and internet device and whatever, to a marketing organization pandering to anyone for a buck. Ah, money. Someone should really start a non-profit alternative to MP3.com. Or should have 5 years ago. No point now, we have peer-to-peer. Less powerful and pretty, but perfectly usable.

…and he lives in Snowmass, Colorado.

I’m posting this one because its something that I’ve always had a (very mild) passing interest in, and so I think other people might find it interesting too. There is a terrible sub-plot on The West Wing about Donna’s new love interest (hopefully he’ll die or disappear like everyone’s love-interest/plot-device seems to do on that show). He says he didn’t vote for Bartlet because of differences over military procurement, and then an interesting exchange happens. Well, not incredibly interesting, but much more interesting when recapped on Television Without Pity:

Donna tries again: “Five-hundred-dollar screwdrivers is why you didn’t vote for the President?” Sparky says he works for the President: “That’s a lot.” Hey, you don’t have to tell Donna. He keeps unpacking his box. Donna claims it’s wasteful spending. Sparky: “No, it’s not.” Donna: “A $400 ashtray.” Sparky sighs, grabs the pipe wrench Donna was using, and smashes the ashtray that’s on his desk. It breaks into three solid chunks. Donna: “What was that?” Sparky: “A $400 ashtray. It’s off the U.S.S. Greenville, a nuclear attack submarine and a likely target for a torpedo. When you get hit with one, you’ve got enough problems without glass flying into the eyes of the navigator and the Officer of the Deck. This one’s built to break into three dull pieces. We lead a slightly different life out there and it costs a little more money.” [“Should people really be smoking on nuclear attack submarines?” — Wing Chun] He goes back to arranging his belongings. And just because Television Without Pity is nothing if not educational, here’s a bit more information about the staggering costs associated with the military, courtesy of JohnConstantine, a self-described Army acquisitions geek: “The reason people see it as a $400 ashtray is because people roll in the RDTE [Research, Development, Test and Evaluation] costs into the per unit cost. In actuality, it doesn’t cost that much to manufacture, so every time you make one, the per unit cost goes down. [In addition] sometimes the cost is seen as X, when that’s actually because classified items have been rolled into the line for the ashtrays, to conceal our intel spending from prying eyes.”

The Daily Show and Salon keep pushing the Democrats to act like the Republicans — advertise, become better at using the tools of consumption to do politics. While there are lots of things that need to change about that party, I’m not sure what good it says about America that the winning party is the one that can best “package” their issues.

Oh boy. I’m back from break and I’ll write about that, along with info about my new computer…but right now I can only wonder at how great the residents must feel of whatever building just had a fire alarm go off. This has been happening far too frequently, generally from “pulls” i.e. pranks, and it is definetally not at all funny. Plus, its freezing cold and snowing out…and people who were previously asleep are now headed outside. Poor folks.