Author: harold

The Metro UI is the shit. After a year and a half of my Windows Phone I can’t wait to get my hands on some Windows 8 goodness. Metro is really, really great I’m not kidding. Anything with icons simply looks like the past, from Windows 7 to iOS to Android. You look old and inefficient, guys. And XP? Oh boy.

Somehow Microsoft transformed apps in “apps”. You have an OS, a UI and services running through them. That’s it.

It’s a perfect mix between Software as Service and an operating system giving you full focus on data. The future, right now.

You don’t need visual designers on Metro (it’s perfectly clean and lean from the start of making “an app”), you need flow designers. On my phone, apps simply porting the icon paradigm and menus are the worst. In Metro flow is everything and when it’s well done it’s pretty perfect: data first, moving around is fast and fluid what the hell do you want? Exactly that.

 
The new Microsoft Surface

Gizmodo does a great job at explaining what is great with this thing above. My first reaction was, this is too small. 10.6 inches? Meh. It might not be for me. But then thinking about the form factor, the touchscreen the pen and the keyboard (You can easily plug a gamepad too), the mobility and of course the great UI, it might be kind of the definitive computer for a lot of people if not most of people. It’s also a big “you need to aim that high in quality” heads up to OEMs.

In short between a new OS, new machines, new focus on design with Microsoft showing the way to PC manufacturers (and yes Dell and HP, what the fuck have you been doing for years?) while some totally get it by themselves, something interesting is happening. Now it’s up to developers to take advantage of that and play the platform game: the first good apps -that everyone will get as must have- can easily make you a millionaire. *wink wink*

The Misconception:  You celebrate diversity and respect others’ points of view.

The Truth: You are driven to create and form groups and then believe others are wrong just because they are others.

Article about groups, pretty interesting as I’m part of the Misconception by default. [by the way doing an experiment with teams of boys only instead of 50/50 boys/girls is a huge bias for the results.]

You remember high school. You’ve worked in a cubicle farm. You’ve watched Stephen King movies. People in new situations instinctively form groups.

Yeah, and that sucks. I always have been singled out because I’m on the fence. Either way or none of them is fine. I’ll probably go on my own. In a zombie situation, I would probably be Michonne. When you have been living in a pretty isolate state, you don’t think groups. And it’s a good thing because they’re based on BS.

Hopefully by now you’ve had one of those late-night conversations fueled by exhaustion, elation, fear or drugs in which you and your friends finally admit you are all bullshitting each other. If you haven’t, go watch The Breakfast Club and come back. The idea is this: You put on a mask and uniform before leaving for work. You put on another set for school. You have costume for friends of different persuasions and one just for family.

I always wanted to have only one mask the closest to who I really am, the better. I hate masks. I see them, they make me cringe. I understand how they work with our group-based society but I don’t like to play this game. Because I value honesty. I’m dumb.

Every human gathering and institution from the Gay Pride Parade to the KKK works to remain connected by developing a set a norms and values which signals to members when they are dealing with members of the in-group and help identify others as part of the out-group.

Exactly, which is if I look back on my life why I constantly have been going in and out groups. I’m never satisfied with them, there’s always a set of norms or values that doesn’t fit me. Musicians who will only vomit everything electronic, praise anything unbearably hard to play and hard to listen to or will be addicted to audio gear porn. Game developers who have a pretty narrow sense of style or black people who might have too much of it (with bling) and so on. And you have to say “yay!” to this or you’re not part of the group. I always feel like the skateboarding tribe as one of the most open and not caring who you are one -at least it was like that where and when I started- but really, no women? But what puts me off groups is what this article described, when you spend more time on outsiders than you do on your own group. For some people it’s all their lives. It’s pointless to me.

So when I enter a group -always pretty easy from the fence- after studying it I always want to improve it, fix it. Sort of expand its boundaries I don’t know I’m in search of universality, not division. Change alone is a problem and it comes directly in conflict with power inside a group and then it either gets complicated or “unnoticed”.

“The research suggests you and rest of humanity will continue to churn into groups, banding and disbanding, and the beautiful collective species-wide macromonoculture imagined by the most Utopian of dreams might just be impossible”

Well, I was hoping on that so leave my goals alone, research. I already know that it probably will not happen in my lifetime but I like to believe in "at the end, we’ll have to hang together”.

What makes me a bit of a pessimist is how groups shape people’s minds and will bury every single bit of rationality. Think of crowds after a soccer game. But the same with socialists or what not. Groups fuck individuals and prevent them to think otherwise by providing enough for their egos. Let’s just be real for a moment.

As psychologist Jonathan Haidt says, our minds “unite us into teams, divide us against other teams, and blind us to the truth.”

He was too dark in Indonesia. A “hapa” child — half and half — in Hawaii. Multicultural in Los Angeles. An “invisible man” in New York. And finally, Barack Obama was black on the South Side of Chicago. This journey of racial self-discovery and reinvention is chronicled in David Maraniss’s biography, “Barack Obama: The Story,” to be published Tuesday.

I read this article (2326 comments) and it’s fascinating to me, this search of being who you are and with whom you’ll grow as a person and feel like yourself. Barack went through a lot and settled down in South Chicago with black folks. I kind of resist thinking about it but I crave it too. I don’t have enough. I have too much of something else. Need more blackness.

Barry and Eric had much in common. They were tall, athletic, smooth, outwardly confident. Moore had grown up in Boulder, Colo., attended predominantly white schools, and like Obama had survived and thrived in an environment where there were few people who looked like him. He came to Los Angeles looking for “a more urban African American experience” where he, like Obama, could sort out his identity.

“Obama was a multicultural mainstream Oxy guy,” Hook said. “He fit right in with anybody. As long as you accepted him, he was good.”

It sounds so familiar to me. It’s the base of our social design: we needed to be part of a group to survive, back in the day and it stayed as the “only way it works”. But when you’re on the fence you don’t choose a group somehow, you’re invited and you can stay but you never really feel like belonging. Until it gets to a rawer level, people looking like you. Is it enough? I don’t know I never joined a group of black folks. I would in LA.

He had been living in the rarified environment of Oxy and Columbia, self-absorbed with his choices, contemplating life on an intellectual plane, and here were people talking about sports and life and family in ways that were not fraught with meanings and symbols. “I felt a greater affinity to the blacks and Latinos there (who predictably comprised about three fourths of the work force . . .) than I had felt in a long time,”

I do understand the refreshing change as it happened to me too, only in reverse: I had been living with countryside white collar down to earth folks and then I was on this intellectual Paris plane. It was good though I learned that with meanings and symbols comes a hell of a lot of BS and segregation, making me divided about knowledge. Sometimes, life is better when you just enjoy it plainly as a life form on a pretty stable amount of matter.

He was a double outsider, racial and cross-cultural. He looked black, but was he? At times he confessed to her that “he felt like an imposter. Because he was so white. There was hardly a black bone in his body.” She realized that “in his own quest to resolve his ambivalence about black and white, it became very, very clear to me that he needed to go black. I told him that. I think he felt very encouraged by my absolute conviction that his future lay down the road with a black woman. He doubted there were any black women he would feel truly comfortable with.

I never thought about my future with any specific concerning the ethnicity of the woman who I would share my life with, but it sure resonates with me. Fuck, it’s like I could have a very private and interesting conversation with the president of the United States of America right now.

“His perspective was universal, removed, not racial. He had reservations about people of every race when it came to tribal thinking.”

*bumps fist* that’s right. And it’s where it’s complex because humans tend to group themselves which is only good to a certain point where it becomes the worst thing. At first it builds up and then, it destroys. History proved it quite often and at a smaller scale, two words: indie game.

But we people on the fence see that as easily as Jedi knights abuse Jedi tricks. And that’s why we freak out/are reserved: we want to be part of all groups and not being part of any group at all, at the same time. It’s unnatural, that’s for sure. The good part is that we have an angle, a capacity of weighing things that nobody has.

I always been an outsider in France but now it’s becoming serious. I feel like a stranger. Speaking French is incredibly odd, searching for words and not feeling comfortable at all.

I don’t know why but seeing Asians and black people NOT speaking English freaks the shit out of me. I want to hear this rolling and low riding Californian accent. This tone.

Of course speaking French fucks up my English and I try not to speak my native language if I can, which is easy by living alone coupled to the rise of self-checkout machines. But my biggest problem is that I really don’t care a lot about what’s going on here. I did before, feeling “back to my hometown” but now I really don’t. Because I don’t feel close in any way. I feel like nothing changes in my old country and my generation is heavily settling down now so it’s going to get worse, as an individual. Being the guitar playing black friend in the park hanging out with white couples+ babies? Not really wanting that. I’ve seen this soft cooning, it’s sad. I’m trying to escape that.

It’s difficult to sit on the fence. Looking back and forth. Left, right.

Composed and created for Flirtatious (but discarded) during winter in Paris, when I was dreaming about sun and warm weather. And then I went to LA in February and I had a pre-mix on my mp3 player and I had forgotten about it. Listening to it while hanging out around Silver Lake, enjoying a warm weather was so powerful.

Now how you get ideas on the go: I recorded the guitar part which sounded good with these settings but added a lot of “hiss”, noise. Solution: adding more noise with waves and birds. And all of sudden you’re at the beach. I can listen to it on repeat, low volume, closing my eyes for a while.

I have a couple of tracks in the work but I don’t really know which one to finish first.

Retirement is a bitch. Retirement homes are more than meh.

My grandfather has Parkinson’s, my grandmother has multiple “dark zones in her brain” forgets everything and has giving up on walking since looking at her husband getting crazier and crazier isn’t helping either.

My dad is bringing them every Saturday for lunch, a bit of TV and family time. It’s now an automatic, long process. It’s more than exhausting, it’s killing all of us to watch a once smart and funny old man getting physically so thin, so stiff and pretty much being a vegetable trying to grab nurses’ breasts and that my mom has to feed before eating. In the rare occasions where he is himself and has all his conscious, he always says “I’m sorry”.

What the fuck is the point of all that. Seriously. It fades out my good memories with him and he’s suffering a slow death.

I don’t know what will be my end but I hope to work until the last day of my life and die in my sleep at home. I never want to be put in a retirement home. My dad’s company works on retirement homes’ ways to do a better job since more that 20 years and I know the numbers: there is no way that elderly’s quality of life gets better because there will be much more old folks than people taking care of them. It’s already a mess and it’s NOTHING compared to the next wave, the baby-papy boom generation.

If something like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s happens to me, I hope I’ll be strong enough and have the possibility to end my life with a sunset, some drugs in my blood and maybe, hopefully a handjob.

It would be nicer, more human and cost-effective for everybody than what we do today.