Tumblin' On

Dear Reader,

I'm trying out Tumblr's blogging system because it strikes a nice balance between blogging and tweeting: bleeting.

I hope you will visit my new digs at petesimon.tumblr.com -- or just wait a few months when I've failed to capture a Tumblr audience and come crawling back to blogspot.

- Pete

Existence

Existence of...something, upon the brink of what a man believes. Standing there to stare into the void. Desiring so intensely to see a face that the eye may play tricks. Questions of whether anything really means anything, or if being alone means total isolation. Is he at peace with his own concept of death? Or does he feel the same ache to grapple with the unknown.

Contemplating purely singular existence is like staring into the sun, one cannot behold it directly without being harmed. A mind could go mad trying to balance notions of nothingness and an infinite being, just as the sense of injustice cannot be satisfied by any worldly means - ideas that can be considered but not grasped.

If the concept of God factors down to imagined kinship for our existential comfort, it remains wholly worthwhile. Pared down to the essential core, God could be proxy for our relationship with the idea of life's value, it spares us the madness of being unable to *know*. And if God exists, why not with benevolence? Maybe grant wishes? Better yet: control our destinies; control our world.

I've long believed in a concept of God that was necessary, not desireable; believed out of need, not want -- that seems more real, doesn't it? Such a being, by definition, would reside beyond my stunted perception so I could take comfort that something was out there.

I don't know if a sane mind could accept death if it meant blacking out and ceasing to exist. Balancing extremes is what a healthy brain does best, so nothing is so impossible if it keeps the feet planted while standing at the edge of the void.

No one writes anymore.

You know what's better than a witty idea packed into a <140 character sentence? The same sentence followed by an elaborative paragraph for the time when the words don't speak for themselves, which is all the time.

I liked to joke about design on the internet and the turnoff that was a graph of text longer than a sentence. "No one reads anymore," I would state cynically. But the same joke doesn't sit so well today, instead I would say: "No one writes anymore."

Writing on the internet can be described in a word, 'curt'. People now write with the same shorthand abbreviations and literal stand-ins they formerly spared for texting, but texting, tweeting, commenting, (*sigh*) 'Like'ing, has steadily eroded the cultures stamina for writing. Instead of Blogging, people are Blurting; instead of spelling people are spurting out character sequences with cryptic meanings.

The result? Good Godson! Just look at Twitter, it's totally illegible. Gangly strands and clumps of characters that read like a corrupt text file. Honestly, a compact tweet requires more decoding than reading, and decoding is what good software is supposed to do FOR us.

I'm as guilty as anyone, I tweet more than most users I know, and the forgiving Lord knows I've written off his people as 'ppl'. And while I'm kneeling in this e-Confessional, I can tell you the 'ppl' message ultimately sucked.

Everyone who writes faces this problem. Saying more with less is considered artistic. When you hash out a good post, you want to tighten it down like a Mac Truck lug nut, so you twist paragraphs until they squeal upon the kerning, but you're still wondering if it's road-ready. People are going to be reading this, and their impatient, erratic gnat-minds will fly at the first participle that dangles lifelessly.

Or maybe the whole thing is beginning to feel like a Vaudeville act? The proverbial hook will emerge from behind the web page and yank you into browser history. You can suffer a few tomatoes to the face but will anyone allow the show to go on? You're a human being, not a deformed circus attraction! Fuck it. Apologies, Joseph Merrick.

I'm willing to bet 90% of bloggers who gave up saw twitter as the summation of what was wrong with their readership. Most probably migrated to twitter, traded in page hits for followers and never looked back.

The truth is, the Internet needs you to write like Fantasia needs Bastian. This is NeverEnding story is about you, but is slowly ceding to the Nothing (or 'Null' as it's referred to in computing).

Do you think people gave up on blogs? No, they gave up on writing them. Our world may be shrinking, but in doing so we are drawn closer together. This is the dawn of a new era, a fresh <P> tag for the fillin'!

Happy keying.

Recession Hiree

"Now start bailing, please. :)"

Flash's orange vs. HTML5's unripe apple

I've read one too many articles that mention Flash and HTML5 in the same sentence. I'm not sure where this comparison came from, I guess people may be noticing their browsers doing things that were once only possible with Flash, thereby concluding that Flash will fade like the floppy drive. Or maybe they saw a cool demo in Chrome that dismantled their conceptions of what was possible with JavaScript. But as history indicates, there's a long distance between possible and actual, and a deep well between them filled with years of non-standard browser innovations...

Flash back to the early, early days of the web-browser, when getting things to look the same was the least of a web developer's concerns. Using Wiz-Bang features of the most advanced browser (such as IE6) meant forgoing big compatibility and walking across security hazards. At that time, the value proposition of Flash was too good to ignore.

Web developers were used to making congressional-sized compromises to make pages work across browsers, so cutting-edge meant choosing one browser. The dreamscape of platform desirables was so opaque the road map for Flash versions was obvious, as it intended to quell those wants for a reliable common ground, and once achieved, raced forward to meet the demands of an exploding Flash development community. This was a group that had all but given up on communion between the browsers of mortal enemies.

There was a growing skepticism among web media developers that the browsers could offer the capability of a solid 3rd party plug-in embedded within a web page. Furthermore, it would take one hell of an UI to pull all the features together in a way accessible to both programmers and animators. Developers who wanted cool things to work were eager to embrace a solution that tackled *most* of what they needed: light-weight, vector animation, with audio, advanced scripting, that rendered the same across ALL BROWSERS.

In part because of availability (affordable at the college store) and because of the burning desire for the platform to succeed, Macromedia's Flash saw an explosion of talent which both legitimized it and pressured the company to cater to the growing ranks of adopters. Macromedia responded nimbly by ramping up the development of Flash possibly at the expense of their other products (Dreamweaver, Freehand, Fireworks).

The application that began as Future Splash, a vector animation tool for producing web-ready content, was soon leveraged as the end-all solution for media rich pages. Since there was no real alternative to Flash, developers began defaulting on Flash-driven pages, and the software's idealized reputation was tarnished. The lack screen-reader accessibility was never well addressed and there was a growing laziness, a sense of arrogance from the Flash community.

When HTML and Javascript improved enough, there began a large departure from and subsequent vilification of Flash for the dependent strain it placed Internet and her ideals of openness and accessibility. Despite the diffusion of interest, Flash continued to improve by offering solid 3D libraries, video streaming, by expanding into programmatic environments with Flex, and onto mobile devices with Air.

Now, at the crest of HTML 5.0, the new edition of the open-web format seems poised at last to occupy Flash's long-held stakeouts, yet Flash is stubbornly resilient, and spreading even faster with Android devices pledging support. Whatever Flash lacks in platform features it has more than accounted for with the vast pervasiveness of the platform and what it can accomplish in its most basic form.

It's possible that the Web Consortium will muscle together a solid media rich standard, but there are already signs that HTML5 isn't what we hope it would be, and when it is there will be legacy browsers to support.

But my intent here is not to dismiss the value of the new web standards. The point is that Flash is an orange to HTML5's apple. Where developers feel free to target a single browser on a single platform, they could just as well use the new standard to build out. But there's always going to be Flash, and the market is always going to have use for a platform that does less but works in more places. When a new plug-in comes along that can boast the vast platform support of flash, while sporting an Award-winning UI (like Flash's) that integrates with other Killer Apps such as Photoshop and Illustrator, and supports video, and offers advanced scripting w/ debugging, with some 3D tossed in for good measure -- that platform could surely claim the place of Flash. Until then, there will be web pages with embedded flash, and lots of them.

On the pending legislation for Health Care Reform

I live in a state where health care is mandated. People must by from insurance companies or face a tax penalty. Without insurance, I paid this penalty when I filed my taxes this year. It bothered me, but I also understood the fee and accepted it because I comprehend how the uninsured burden the providers. If nothing else, I accept the responsibility of abiding the law.

The argument that passing some measure is better than none is persuasive. With history being the greatest indicator, health care legislation is hard pass. Passing anything breaks the ice, gets people to think more about what is, and hence, what could be. Laws deemed to be inadequate are more likely to be revisited than issues that have never manifested law.

If Congress passes the bill, it will be a step forward. The measures will likely cost money we don't have, and there are certainly flaws and injustices in the bill that are unknown presently. We need to see the results, take a pulse, and amend, but there must be something to amend. Even a ham-handed, slanted, weak-tea effort. Maybe this bill is just that, but I believe it is better than that.

I have predicted (repeatedly) that this effort to reform health care would fail, and now it looks like it may pass. I hope it does pass, and will eat crow happily, belch raucously, then stand up full-bellied, and applaud the Democratic party for proving me and all skeptics wrong.

My plate is set, I've tucked in napkin into my collar, and I'm sitting impatiently for my Corvus cuisine.

Before too long

Leave me before summer
When the heat wave comes and pulls
Beads of sweat from my cold face
Trickle down the paths of tears
Following new creases
But lingering upon same places
Then drop before too long

I lie in bed
Without you
Consumed by hateful tongues
That raze a molten heart
Whose bright coal fuels
A young fool's faith
Now smoldering up
In careless smoke
Above his life's loveless remains
Spitting sparks into the dark
That fade before too long