Earworms

An earworm is a piece of music that sticks in your head. You hear it over and over, even though no one is playing anything. Researchers say that nearly everyone experiences them at one time or another. I've certainly had my share. Maybe it's an attribute of aging, or a quirk of my construction, but I seem to be more worm-infested than before.

Or at least I was. For some time any music I listened to became an earworm. Rock. Classical. It didn't matter. Hear it once  and it replays endlessly.

Earworms are usually music, but not always. Two days ago a new earworm appeared. "Tenser said the tensor," it said. "Tenser said the tensor." What on earth was that?

Google to the rescue. It's one segment of a larger, and deliberately engineered earworm, from a story called The Demolished Man, written by Albert Bester. Wikipedia tells me that it won the first Hugo Award in 1953. For those who don't know, and because my head is full of stupid little facts, The Hugo is an award that is to science fiction what the Oscar is to movie making. If memory serves (and Google will tell me in a minute if it does) The Hugo was named after Hugo Gernsbach, an early publisher of sci-fi.

And speaking of random associations in the aging brain, the Oscar, if memory serves me, got its name because it reminded someone of his or her Uncle Oscar.

Let's Google! And the answer is: Hugo Gernsbach is spelled Hugo Gernsback. So two points off for spelling.

And the name Oscar, officially the Academy Award of Merit has an origin that conforms to my memory (though the story is disputed), as described in the 'Naming' section here.

Another claimed origin is that the Academy's Executive Secretary, Margaret Herrick, first saw the award in 1931 and made reference to the statuette's reminding her of her "Uncle Oscar" (a nickname for her cousin Oscar Pierce).

Ten points off for not knowing whose Uncle Oscar it was.

But enough Googling. Back to my latest earworm.
In The Demolished Man, the story's hero, Ben Reich has a songwriter named Duffy Wyg& write him an earworm that keeps telepaths (espers) from reading Ben's mind and finding out what he's up to. The part that I remember was:

Tenser, said the Tensor.

Tenser, said the Tensor

Then I found this, when I googled for that phrase:

, said the Tensor.Tenser, said the TensorTension, apprehension,And dissension have begun

And finally I got the whole story from Wikipedia:

Eight, sir; seven, sir;

Six, sir; five, sir;

Four, sir; three, sir;

Two, sir; one!

Tenser, said the Tensor.

Tenser, said the Tensor.

Tension, apprehension,

And dissension have begun.

My descent into earwormery seems to have been halted, for which I am grateful to the earworm gods. I listened to PSY while writing this post, and the song, which has been stuck in my head every time I've heard it, isn't there now.

But, sadly, I have a new one. Sting. Walking on the Moon. In my head.

Shit!

Project70 identity crisis: going social

There's so much interesting stuff on the web that hardly a day passes without me finding something so cool that I want share with someone else. Sadly, generally, I don't. Rarely, I find something so compelling that I'm driven to send a "Hey look at this" email to a few folks. But just a few. And I don't do it too much; no one likes their inbox stuffed with crap that they didn't ask for because some friend thought they might find it interesting. They might even find it interesting. But Jesus Christ, now is not the time! Delete! Delete!

So I don't sent out those kinds of emails, much. Other people who did it have stopped doing it because social networks are a better tool. Social networks let people see what someone they like or find interesting thought was cool when they are in the mood to see what someone they like or find interesting thinks is cool. Sadly, generally, I don't use social networks much, either.

Not that I'm not plugged in. I'm a connected guy. I have accounts with Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. YouTube has also become a social network, and I have two accounts there. I read G+ daily, seeing what people who I like and find interesting thought was so cool that they decided to share it; and I also use G+ to read what the wise individuals in my family who post there have to say.  Occasionally I share something or comment on G+, but not much. I'm a Facebook lurker, meaning that I read Facebook to keep up on a subset of my friends and on the people in my family who have not discovered the joys of G+. But I just about never comment. And I never post. I check LinkedIn when I have a reason to, which is rare these days. I have a Twitter account (probably a few) but don't follow anyone, and I'm a tweeting virgin. I've used my YouTube account to upload and to share a few videos. That's my social networking life.

I blog, which is a way to share ideas, and that's what's leading to my social renaissance. As part of my Project 70 I've decided to become socially active. I plan to start posting regularly on G+. And then I'll decide what to do next.

After I see if I do what I plan to do.

But first I have to handle my identity crisis. On the Internet we prove that we are who we say we are by being able to click on a link sent to an email address that we say is ours. As far as the Internet is concerned, I am my email address. I click, therefore I am.

Many people have work and home emails, which gives them two Internet identities--a work identity and a home identity. That's that's just an extension of reality: who we are at work is often not who we are at home. Certainly that was true for me. At work I was an extrovert and at home I was an introvert. I was an extrovert at home because it was my job to be extroverted. I got paid for having that personality. At home I was an introvert because--well, that's what I do when no one is paying me.

Right now I have no fewer than eight email identities. Perhaps I have ten or twelve. Who's counting. One is an old, retired yahoo account, my first personal Internet identity. Three accounts are special purpose business identities, easy to keep separate from the rest. I use another account (goooglefanboy at gmail.com) when raving about something Googley. A couple of them are artifacts of early messing around with email. Once you have one, you keep it. One is the main account I use in my own domain. (Everyone should have his/her own domain). And one was the gmail account I started to use after giving up my yahoo account and before setting up my domain.



My identity crisis is the result of Google's account authentication policy. Facebook and LinkedIn let you associate several email addresses with an account. I can be two email identities with a single social account. But Google 's social network associates all its services with a single email address. Which means that if you have two addresses you are two people.

This isn't a problem for most of my email addresses, or for my work address. I'm not social when I'm not being personal. But right now I have two identities for my two personal email accounts and that means I've got two social identities.

And now I discover that I don't have a crisis, just a long post explaining the crisis that I don't have and the lead-up to the crisis. Well good! Google has done something about the problem. Here's the story I found that led to this support page, which led to Google Takeout (http://www.google.com/takeout will ask you to authenticate yourself if you're running a Google account) and Google's Data Liberation Front.

That problem solved, I'm going to go social. Really soon now. Look for me on G+.

I give up! Now I can start.

It's January 26th, and my last post was dated January 11th. My plan for 70 Years Old WTF had been to write one post a day. But here I am two weeks behind. So I've decided to give up. Completely. Which means I can let go of my losses, and make a new start.

When I was a kid, whenever things got too hard, I'd tell myself I didn't care, press the "I give up" button in my brain, and walk away. It was easy. It came naturally. Then, some time in my 30s, I decided to be stubborn and I got stubborn about being stubborn. I stubbornly refused to change.

It was a life-changing decision.  When my business got in trouble I stubbornly refused to give up, kept the business going, and eventually sold it. When the relationship between Bobbi and me got in trouble, as it did from time to time, and as I think is almost inevitable in a relationship between strong-willed people, I stubbornly refused to give up, and I stubbornly refused to compromise on a less-than-ideal relationship. I fought to make it her and me against the problem rather than her against me because of a problem. And once we'd done that we fought against the problem together until we'd defeated it. When she proposed giving up, I used my stubbornness skills. I refused.

I'm still married to my first wife and still in love with her because I'm stubborn. I've consistently refused to settle for less

Back to the blog.

When I first started falling behind I preserved my post-a-day fiction by predating my posts. Blogger lets you do that. I tolerated being a day behind, then two, then three. I preserved the fiction that I was still writing a post a day weeks after I wasn't.

Then everything went completely to hell. We drove down to Boston, spent a few days there, got on a train to California. The chaos of Boston and the family, the newness of the cross-country train trip, the change in my 'routine' as we arrived in California and settled into our digs, energy fluctuations as I got into my new coding project and started getting serious about work, a head full of details from doing the same, and my ever-present lack of discipline all ganged up on me. Day after day I found ways to avoid writing. And then, today, I found myself two weeks behind.

I could have refused to give up, and could have tried to catch up. I might even have done it. If I had  written three posts a day I would have been caught up in about a week. Or I could have given up, which (the title of this post is a clue) is what I decided to do.

Stubbornness is a skill I developed after being a natural giver-upper. I practiced that skill for decades.

But giving up can be a skill. There are times when skilled giving up is better than skilled stubbornness. There's a subtle, but important difference between stubbornly refusing to give up and skillfully giving up, then starting anew. From the outside it looks the same. And for some people there's no detectable difference. For me, there is a difference. And the difference matters.

So I've given up.

And I've started anew.

My goal isn't to catch up. It's to do a shitload of writing. I'll publish my posts on the date and at the time that I finish them.

Then,  as a treat, when I've written enough, I might decide to undo my giving up, and go back and change the dates.

Or I might not.

Either way, right now's not the time to decide that.

Right now's the time to read this draft, edit it, publish it, and start the next one.