Posts Filed Under 100days
Why do people think I'm red when I'm mad or mean?
Does being sad and lonely really make me blue?
Does my current state of mind really change my hue?
Why are bad guys all in black, while good guys all wear white?
And things are always sort of gray when you aren't sure whats right?
What will people think of you if you've got multi-colored skin.
Will they tip their hat and smile or will they laugh and grin?
Purple can mean you are regal, if scared then you are yellow
But what will people really think of a pink and orange fellow
A green thumb is good with plants, red handed, caught being bad.
But what exactly does it convey when hands are teal and plaid?
These are the things that I now ask ever since our class trip
to the tie-dye factory and that big dye vat slipped.
It has everything I could need and I live here quite well
I do not like to leave my shell as it's the safest place for me.
I block the doors with my claws and there's no entry
But there is one big disadvantage to this sheltered little zone
And that is that I spend my days feeling so alone
No friends will ever visit since I haven't made a one
And playing games without a friend isn't very fun
But I am growing quickly and I'll soon outgrow my shell
So I should search for a new home and a friend as well
This shell is too wide, the shell is broke, and this one is too thin
Finally I find one just right and shut myself right in
No friends this time I guess that this really does confirm it
I'll never make any friends living like a hermit
My very favorite summer treat
Now to choose my ice cream flavor
A joy I thought would never waver
Strawberry or chocolate, yum
Maybe try some bubble gum
Vanilla bean, pistachio
But this list has lots to go
Candied corn sounded sweet
But then there is smelly feet.
Coffee crusted candied crab
Blackened cod or taxi cab
Fudge and pickle elderberry
This list is getting kind of scary
Sea salt swirled chicken wing
Antelope with onion ring
Caviar caramel crunch
I think I'm going to lose my lunch
Malted mushroom, sweet sardine
Candied yam, peach praline
spinach mixed Asparagus
I stopped right at octopus
All the flavors I could try
No thank you and goodbye
Picky Eater
No, I won't touch it one bit
It will never reach my tummy
Right in this bowl it shall sit
I doubt this soup agrees with me
I'm quite certain I would sicken
The contents seem quite strange you see
But I'd pretend it were chicken
It's not the broth I will not try
It's not the gunk from the sink
It's not the eye I saw float by
Though I'd swear I saw it wink
I'd rather eat a mound of goop
Or a whole dune of sand
For when I tried to sip this soup
It tried to eat my hand
Blank
Yes blank.
I think I thought an important thought but that was yesterday.
I got so distraught that I forgot my thought,
Later I thought
my thought might have been for naught and I just dismissed it away.
But then my mind was fraught
with the fear that that thought might not have been for naught
and I was left with only dismay.
You see my mind hadn't had time
to think a thought, for good or for naught, in so many a day.
But then I had a very good thought
and now I have taught
my brain a trick for remembering things anyway.
Writing down thoughts
aught to keep your thoughts
safer than thinking your thoughts
and letting them slip away.
So that at the end of the day
my mind may be blank
but my page isn't
and my thoughts are all okay.
Mix up at the zoo
And no one knows quite what to do
the turtles say nay
and the zebras turned grey
And the monkeys are now turning blue
There's been a mix up at the zoo
The giraffes are as short as you
The lions take flight
But only at night
While the bears just sit there and coo
There's been a mix up at the zoo
The sheep all travel by kangaroo
The llamas now toot
while the elephants hoot
And the ducks are all saying moo
There's been a mix up at the zoo
The chameleon, oh how he grew
he's as big as a house
but still scared of the mouse
who runs faster than the emu
What has gone wrong at the zoo?
How'd this happen? We haven't a clue.
The gates have all shut.
They tried their best, but
Nobody knows what they should do
I have a jungle of my very own, I explore it all through the day,
All round the clock
turning up rocks
Hey, I just found someone's sock
I guess its not quite so unknown, in this part of the jungle today.
I have a jungle not far from my house, but my mom doesn't like it none
I sneak out the door
and proceed to explore
my jungle is never really a bore
One day I even found a mouse, of coure it was only a stuffed one
When I awoke this morning at nine, and oh it was such a bungle
my jungle is gone
dad went out at dawn
he destroyed it, he went and mowed the lawn
and Mom just said "Its about time, it had grown into a jungle"
The Trees
The trees don't scare me, one bit.
They don't frighten me at all.
They are lovely and green and wonderfully tall.
And the colors they show throughout the fall.
They house all the birds with their lovely call.
And they grow lots of fruit, both big and small.
Why should they frighten me at all
Even when it's this dark outside?
The trees don't scare me, no sir.
They don't frighten me at all.
Sure they are tall and dark tonight
And they sway about in the wind alright
And they always seem to block my sight
And this path is certainly awful tight
But they don't frighten me at all.
And what are those eyes gleaming in the moonlight?
Probably just an owl about to take flight.
Or maybe a bat out for a bite.
They shouldn't frighten me at all...
Right?
I can see the 100 days challenge being many different things to many different people. For example I believe originally it was top get would be authors writing more and more. Not publishing every day, just writing. The idea is to not take any days off. For bloggers this became publishing well thought out ideas daily for 100 days. The other part of the challenge was to restart counting if you didn't do one day. Anyone who says "I did the 100 days challenge, I just missed ..." didn't follow the spirit of the 100 days challenge.
For me the point of the challenge is two fold. Firstly it is to be social. I am working to define the future of the social web, it's rather silly to not be using ny site constantly, trying to be social. Second, the point is top use my site. My site is always in need of work and the more I use it the more I find things to fix.
Actually, after yesterday's Silversteen inspired poem, I am thinking about sifting to a lot more poetry.
By Ben Roberts
And yes, I count those.
Starting out a silly thing and seeing where it goes.
The hardest part is always trying to make it rhyme.
And that is why I went ahead and just rhymed rhyme with rhyme.
Seuss cheated with his words by making new ones up.
But I just find that so simplistic and a little flizzerup.
To drive some readers really mad, throw in an unmatched part.
And so I'm getting near the end and running out of time.
But sadly, I only reached a count of ninety nine.
Fin.
Google is not a rabbit
This morning I was chatting on Google Hangouts with my brother, currently living in South Korea. When I left the house, I just picked up the conversation on my phone, but I realized something that hadn't dawned on me before. The sound it makes is not the sound I set back when I first started using hangouts. When did that change? My best guess is that this changed when I Google finally bestowed upon us the ability to set custom sounds for our hangouts conversations.
If Facebook is the "move fast and break things" company, then Google is the "test everything" company. Google hangouts had so much hype around it. A place to unify all our communications. A single place to have merged conversations. The hype has us believing it would give us a single communication platform. The reality has been anything but. Almost immediately people realized the lack of functionality in it. You couldn't even set custom sounds per person. I'm sure I'm not the only one who sent feedback almost immediately. And it took quite some time for that feature to roll out. WHAT TOOK SO LONG?
This singular feature isn't just a one off case either. I feel like every feature users request takes 6 months to a year to roll out. Google moves with the speed of a tortoise. Google Hangouts' group chats still don't feel properly integrated. Try using voice to send a message to a group. We only recently got the ability to do this with individual hangouts. I hope Google is very much regretting its deal with Vidyo in the creation of hangouts. What used to be an open platform of Google chat (XMPP behind it) is now a very much closed system that is slow to add functionality to.
Maybe at some point Google will realize its folly but I suspect we'll have a long time to wait for that too.
I told Ann that I would write up some of my thoughts on why deleting other's posts via any sort of social web api is not needed. So here it is in my bleary eyed state.
There is a bit of arguement about how groups should work in federated social web. Realistically there are 3 key concerns, independant sites, public silos, and private company networks. One of the key points of the indieweb has been control of your own data, so while groups might merge all of these users together, its of particular importance to indieweb that our own posts cannot be deleted by anyone else. I believe this same policy can work just fine at an API level in group interactions. Lets start with the indieweb site creating a group, however that happens. If another indieweb member joins and posts, they are posting their content on their own site, and then a copy is just propogated to the group. Likewise they are free to pull in the original group conversation back to their own site. If we abstract this to say that one of those indieweb sites to have multiple people within it, this works just fine. Go one step further and it is the equivalent of a silo. Between and indieweb site and a silo, data can move exactly the same way, no indieweb site can delete a post that exists within a silo, they can only delete their own post and tell the silo the post was deleted. You can swap a company network in for these public silos and again, it will work exactly the same.
With a "group", the question comes in the form of deleting the entire group. We see in facebook that deleting a group removes all posts within that group. But in the indieweb, the oposite would be wanted, deleteing a group would do nothing to the original post. This is actually not a conflict at all when you consider that within a silo, anything can be done. A silo could choose to delete all posts of its user's when a group gets deleted. A silo cannot delete any indieweb user's content, but the silo can remove all reference to it. While on the indieweb site, the copies of posts from the silo users might still exist on the indieweb site but all links to the silo copies of these posts would be gone. The basic thing is that within a silo, there is no limits on how the internal implementation handles this.
Again this all applies equally to any sort of business setting. If there is a group project between two companies, neither company should be able to delete the posts of the employees of the other company. Also each company would prefer to keep copies of anything posts from the other company, so as not to lose context to the comments made. Any attempt to force deletion of content from the other will ultimately be futile as there is always a way to save anything that is viewable by someone. Inside of a company's system there could be complex systems for deciding who can post, where, how data is archived, approval processes, etc. It is still all internal implementation, and not an issue for the API.