My idea is this: One single hardware button can make a call to a number you set up. By default it’s 911, but it’s adjustable. Maybe on the iPhone it could be a home-button tap pattern. On Androids where the screen contains the buttons now, maybe it could be a combination of volume rockers and the power button. Easy to do on purpose but hard to do by accident.

Now I know what you’re thinking: Siri and Google’s voice recognition. Yes, you can tell it to call emergency services. But what if you’re out of data range? What if you don’t have your backup phone with you?

Really though this is more of a firmware thing, especially for Apple. I think it could be part of a future iOS release and could be backported to older phones.

I don’t know. To me it just seems like an oversight.

To do research:

• Library online catalog/PDF full text journals from home (through a proxy which they allow).
• Bing/Google to find good primary and secondary sources that are old and out-of-print or just not in print but online instead, social media (I’ll come back to that), print books, magazines (of course, but not often).

You’ll notice I don’t mention Wikipedia. That’s because I refuse to look at it while researching so I don’t get suckered into using it. I will sometimes use it as another fact check, to glean the meaning of something quickly, or to see if there are other sources available.

To read research: Interesting news articles and analysis (and other nonfiction longform pieces that are not journalistic in nature–web-based HTML) go to ReadItLater. Articles that I want to save for citations go into Evernote via Evernote Clearly or ReadItLater’s “Send to Evernote” function. PDF journals go into a folder on my Dropbox account. I read them with FoxIt Reader (for PC) and GoodReader (for iPhone/iPod) so I can make annotations.

To write about research: Make an outline either in Word or on paper first (or do an ink note diagram with OneNote or Evernote). Word is used for writing papers and doing citations. I don’t use automatic citations because they’re never quite right. I always have the OWL Purdue site handy so I can see how to format them correctly. On larger papers I may look into something like Zotero or NoodleTools to keep my citations aligned with my quotations, but I have yet to need them and will pretty much always do manual footnotes and bibliography regardless.

To save assignments: Dropbox. Dropbox Dropbox Dropbox. You can set it up so you have a local copy of all the files on Dropbox as well as a server copy so you will almost always have at least one way to access your data. You can do this, and have it automatically sync new documents to their servers, if you install their Windows program.

To take notes in class: I use pencil and paper, starring key terms, and putting dates or other small tidbits in the left margin (I’m a history major). I later type them using Evernote and clean them up so they’re easier to search later. Complex stuff merits an ink note (although I haven’t had to use any yet). I can export Evernote notes as PDF files using CutePDF Writer instead of printing them, if anyone else asks for them and doesn’t have Evernote. I also record the lecture audio with my iPod and sometimes listen to it while I’m retyping notes to be sure I don’t miss anything. I’ll occasionally listen to it while studying for an exam. Obviously, this works better in some classes than others. If the professsor uses PowerPoint slides or handouts then I may not need to record it (but I still take handwritten notes). If the professor is relatively freeform then I do both. This works better in lecture-style classes. Classes centered on discussion or hands-on participation are more difficult to capture (although capturing a good debate can be a fantastic resource).

To stay on schedule:

• Wunderlist for quick to-dos that I can get done in a week or so (read this chapter, do these questions, talk to the professor). Also for paper due dates and my bucket list.
• Outlook Exchange calendar for repeated or long tasks (exams, special events, and the class schedule if I can’t remember it and until I get used to it).

To use social networking: Here’s the biggie.

• Facebook is for friends and Words with Friends.
• E-mail is for close friends, support, online orders and slower form newsletters than RSS. Mailing lists are for staying in touch with projects I follow (like ReactOS) more closely and with less noise than the forum’s RSS feed and less interaction than IRC. Newsletters and DailyLit are for when I want it to be more personal and/or the RSS feed is lacking.
• Texting is for quick emergency messages.
• Forums are for relatively moderated slow discussion publicly.
• IRC is for relatively unmoderated live discussion privately (and tends to be more technical).
• Instant messaging clients are last resorts.
• Skype is for emergency calls to others without landline or cell service; also useful for class discussions and study groups although I haven’t had to do that yet.
• Reddit is for fun, intelligent discussion of niche topics mixed with stress relief.
• Metafilter is for a more serious specific set of questions and with much less noise than Twitter or Reddit. It’s not divided by topic, but instead organized by user-specified tags. You never know what you’ll get, but you know it’ll almost always be quality content.
• Twitter is for emergency messages, following the scene, and keeping up with stubborn people who don’t have an RSS feed for their site. Twitter is too much noise! Let me repeat that if you didn’t hear me. TWITTER IS TOO MUCH NOISE. Hashtags and business-ats make it look busy and when something moves as quickly as it does, almost impossible to read.
• Flipboard is for Facebook and RSS on the go.
• Zite is for interesting curated content not necessarily from another curated site. Many articles from Zite make it into my ReadItLater queue.
• WordPress and blogging is for expanding on the things I read, and sharing them in a personable manner, but with more control than a forum.
• StumbleUpon is for finding stuff that Zite, Metafilter, Flipboard, Reddit, or RSS misses and that you may not think to search for (e.g. “Reading” is one of my categories in Zite, but SU can bring a twist on that by giving me a website about, say, pictures of cats holding books, or a reading comprehension test, or a blend of bookcovers made into a collage, which is not something I would necessarily search for but something I would enjoy. It’s something that’s not noteworthy enough to appear in the news or as a front page post on Metafilter or Reddit (although both have a long history with cats), but something that is relevant.
• Tumblr is indescribably fantastic.
• Flickr is for Creative-Commons licensed images I can use for presentations or nontraditional assignments.
• Downcast is for catching podcasts.
• Usernames and passwords are scattered in text files here and there, or in Evernote, or memorized.

Phew. See what he means? There are way too many choices. You really have to make sure you use all of what you signed up for. If not: get rid of it. Maybe I should practice what I preach, though.

It turns out that I didn’t delete the Calculator app at all–it had been accidentally moved into another folder. This took me months to figure out and just today I found it sitting in the folder for the Camera app. If you can’t find it nested in another folder, you can use iFunBox’s search capability. All you have to do is move the app’s folder back to the root of your Applications folder (DiskAid is easier for this) and restart the device.

• To do this, copy the folder to your computer in DiskAid or iFunBox and note where it is saved
• Delete the app’s folder from your device
• Drag the folder on your computer to the “Applications” folder on the device and restart.

Or, in DiskAid, drag the folder from where it is on the device to the “Applications” folder at the top of the folder list–that’s where it needs to go.

This seems more likely to occur than actually deleting it from the device. If that is the case then you’ll need to do a firmware restore or find a copy of the app’s folder online that matches your iOS version.

But, what if an expected change doesn’t occur? What if my frustration is built out upon this notion that things will get better and they don’t? What if what I feared would happen is exactly what happened? There is a big nervous buildup, and you hope like mad, but you know under your skin the truth: nothing will change. Even when I’m scared to death of it, sometimes I really want it; and the only time I want it is when it doesn’t happen.

Over the course of time, you expect changes. Even those of us who are averse to it expect changes in other people. Sometimes it’s a relief that they are still as we remember them, but other times we are disheartened because they seem as if they have not matured.

Which is not to say I want to change people. Everybody knows that’s impossible. But I always have wanted to have a positive influence on someone’s life, and that I’m not accomplishing. It honestly breaks my heart. I’m not trying to change a fundamental self; rather, I’m attempting to encourage them to be a more willing and open-minded person. I also want to understand them. I feel like we can reach a rapport if we could just ignore our sensitivities and make a genuine effort to understand one-another truly and deeply, instead of spouting off leftist and rightist bias. We’re people with opinions, not opinions with mouths. Yet it takes an incredibly strong effort to overcome beliefs so ingrained in us. To truly open our eyes we all have to swallow the medicine without sugar.

I want to show that you don’t have to be a jackass to a get a rise. You don’t have to be the comedian in the room to get attention. You don’t have to be so outlandish in everything you do in order to get what you want. You can accomplish things modestly and humbly, and in the long term feel much better about it. You can actively pursue an opinion without insult and slander and hatred.

That probably sounds like I’m a blowhard who just never has any fun. While I am, that’s not saying you can’t cut loose. I think fun and laughter are really all most of us have in the world. Trouble is best emotionally countered with humor; and there’s always trouble. But you don’t have to be so eccentric about it all the time. Fun is great and exciting and brings joy to the world, but there’s a line you cross between funny and arrogant and offensive. That line is very hard to draw.

I know nothing of the comedy career, so I’m not qualified to speak on it, but perhaps we can apply a bit of Poe’s Law here. Poe’s Law states that a strong parody of religious fundamentalism is impossible to distinguish from actual religious fundamentalism. Regardless of your feelings for this statement, I think “religion” can be substituted for “comedy”. Comedy is making fun of yourself and others, but it’s always good-natured. When you make light of your own triumphs instead of mistakes, it begins to cross that line.

In other words, doing something funny in front of an audience and then talking about it to the same audience is part of this line. They saw it. Cool people don’t look at explosions. Cool comedians don’t tell the same audience what they just did. Don’t talk about your successes in being funny. That’s meta-comedy. It can be hilarious, but it is delicately balanced. And oftentimes, it is hard to tell whether a comic is truly self-centered or parodying those who are.

So, why did I bring that up? What does comedy have to do with change? The answer lies in offensive, arrogant, personalities that should have learned more humility by this point. Comedy that is downright self-absorbed, and more than once genuinely offensive because their true personality matches what they say. They are not witty or parodying or making clever observations, but instead are full of themselves and seem reserved to reveal their own misgivings.

I say this all in the context of seeing some old friends yesterday. I was nervous because I hadn’t seen these people in a long time. I was nervous because I wanted them to be still accepting of me and yet changed a bit so that our relationships would be better and they might become more in-touch with who they are and who everybody else is. But by and large that did not happen. I was displeased, and pretty sad of heart, but I knew that this was exactly how it would be.

I won’t deny that I’ve changed, and for the worse. I’m jaded and full of mid-life harumph. Maybe they haven’t changed, but maybe I’ve changed too much for them to accept me. Maybe the only change at all has been in me. I would like to think I’ve matured and now see through some of the old charades, but I’m probably just a grumpy basement dweller. I don’t belong in their lives any more, and they saw it better and sooner than I did.

But, who am I to judge these people? I am not them. Maybe they see something I don’t. This might really be the life for them. And if it makes them happy (and nobody knows what makes someone happy other than the self), I shouldn’t complain.

But I’m not a long-form writer. I can’t read long-form writing. Books are hard for me. I don’t keep a diary even though I want to. Twitter is both the ruin of the attention span and the future of it. When I have a space so small, I can reduce myself to my core ideas. That’s more powerful (at least for me) than you might think. Maybe it makes me feel like I can show off by spouting off witticisms as I’m wont to do; though part of it is that genuine desire to reach the point in myself where I can say exactly what I mean, to the point, without making things longer than they need to be. I can talk more often about more things, and as someone who tends to whine about first-world problems, it’s liberating.

I know, I’m years too late. I still won’t join, but I get why people do.

(I’ll just go back under my rock now)

It has a login page at http://stat.adlesse.com/dashboard, and subpages for the different widgets. There is no mention of this page publicly visible. This could be for internal use by the company, but why is there a need to track?

Adlesse has little contact information (there is an e-mail form, but I like to have addresses and names), and is also “patent pending” which is not a good sign to me (no bearing on the extension, I’m just inherently suspicious of patents). They are very protective of their “algorithm”. They have a social media presence on Twitter, but their feed is empty.

The Adlesse extension, and the FastestTube extension with Adlesse Lite, insert custom HTML. The custom-injected HTML is on-par with other extensions that customize sites. This isn’t surprising, and is the desired behavior. The issue is that I have seen tracker images (one-pixel GIFs) inserted as well, which made me suspicious. Finding these is how I discovered the above tracking URL.

It could be that this tracking is to help retain the preferences set on the Personal settings page (which is online and not part of the extension — meaning it saves a cookie, probably). While this is an odd configuration, it would seem this was done because the service is cross-browser. Internet Explorer 9 doesn’t appear to have a way to edit extension options if the extension doesn’t provide a GUI element, so this is a way to address that.

The difference between Adlesse and Adlesse Lite appears to be that Lite is an all-inclusive installer, whereas the plain version is an extension (per-browser). One would tend to assume the opposite. The terms of service are only available if you install the executable version. Both appear to use a variation of “Wombat” – a JavaScript library. WombatBHO.dll for IE, and the Chrome extension links to Wombat with JavaScript inline. Wombat itself appears harmless. It is a strange find, but not the cause of concern.

From the privacy policy section of their EULA included with Adlesse Lite (emphasis mine):

6.1. Privacy Policy. You hereby expressly consent to Adlesse’s processing of your personal data (which may be collected by Adlesse or its distributors) according to Adlesse’s current privacy policy as of the date of the effectiveness hereof which is incorporated into this Agreement by reference. By entering into this Agreement, you agree that Adlesse may collect and retain information about you, including your name, email address and credit card information. Adlesse employs other companies and individuals to perform functions its behalf. Examples include fulfilling orders, delivering packages, sending postal mail and e-mail, removing repetitive information from customer lists, analyzing data, providing marketing assistance, processing credit card payments, and providing customer service. They have access to personal information needed to perform their functions, but may not use it for other purposes.

I do not know why this service would need any of this information. What does this company do? I wonder if this is boilerplate EULA or if this is specific to Adlesse. I do not know how they would obtain this information, either, unless it later becomes a service that is charged for, or they read cookies from other sites. How else is it that I can get the “Latest tweets from [my] friends” if there is no way to inform Adlesse of my details?

Curiously, none of these three extensions are on the official Chrome Webstore.

Also,

Adlesse publishes a privacy policy on its web site and may amend such policy from time to time in its sole discretion.

I have not found one, neither on the site of Adlesse nor of Adlesse Lite.
Both sites now have privacy policies (Adlesse and AdlesseLite), and Adlesse has an e-mail feedback address. Both privacy policies are currently thus:

This a temporary privacy policy. The complete and final version of our privacy policy is coming soon and will be available on this page. For now, we would like to inform you about some key points.
Adlesse uses a number of subsystems on our various sub-domains. For instance, stat.adlesse.com is a statistics system we use to gather important data that is used to optimize our operations. We assure you that all the hits on stat.adlesse.com are anonymous. Cookies are used there only to count the number of the unique users.
The subdomains lite.adlesse.com and dispatch.lite.adlesse.com are used for the internal system organization, we anonymously collect statistics of clicks on the elements of our widgets in order to make the widgets more convenient for you. Statistics is collected anonymously and can not be tracked to an individual user.
We respect and protect your privacy.

I appreciate their effort to disambiguate some misunderstandings on my part.

Should you not want these extensions, they seem gracefully easy to remove. When bundled with FastestTube, you can uninstall the extension or disable the Adlesse part of it by going to a site that has replacement content by Adlesse (such as a Google search page), clicking “AdlesseLite is on” and choosing your options from there. The installer version can be uninstalled. Removing per-browser BHOs/extensions might prove to be a bit more difficult but all modern browsers make this process pretty painless via some sort of extension manager interface.

I’ve been in college for two semesters now and am finally (read: barely) coming around to the workload. Even so, this semester is more difficult than the last (especially with regard to reading), so I’ve had to create a bit of a “flow” in order to study better.

My classes this semester:

Philosophy
Spanish
Western Civilizations
Knighthood and Citizenship (a literature class)
Seminar
Italian Renaissance

The best thing to happen to studying for me was getting an iPod Touch for Christmas last year. It has proven immensely useful. I use it more for study (and gaming…) than for music. I don’t think I would’ve been coerced into changing study habits without it, even with the heavier workload.

For philosophy, we have assigned readings. He doesn’t mention them in class but they’re on the syllabus. They’re all online, old, public domain primary texts. I save them to ReadItLater and read them, usually using the article view instead of the full page view.

For Spanish, we have a lot of vocabulary and grammar. I’ve started putting them in an iOS app called iSRS (free version available too). It’s a spaced repetition system–in other words, digital flashcards. It keeps track of how well you know an answer by how high you mark your confidence of it. It syncs with the PC and creates standard Mnemosyne (another SRS) deck files, so you can study on a normal computer, as well.

Now, Western Civ. I have an Evernote account and after I take notes in class I come home and type them up (I don’t take a computer to school). I do this because we get review sheets before tests, and this way I can look over all the items by searching through my notes instead of trying to skim through all the paper. I’ve also started recording lectures with the iPod. It works great, except I need to remember not to wear a noisy jacket next time. In some ways, I wish I had an iPad or a bigger device to record with. With an iTouch, everyone is going to think it’s a phone if I leave it in the open, so having to stuff it in a pocket makes the sound worse. But then again, that almost defeats the purpose of portable studying that I wanted the iTouch for.

For the knighthood class, I just take a pencil and mark up the books like crazy. Our assignments are online so I answer the questions after I read. Sometimes, nothing beats the classic method of marking up books. I was hesitant to do so at first, because the bookstore has a policy of not buying back books that are marked in; but for a class like this, it’s pretty much necessary. Besides, I bought used books this semester in worse condition than what a pencil mark would do to them. One of them was stabbed through the cover with a pencil and it made a hole about 20 pages deep.

Seminar is a yearlong “introduction to college” kind of class. We’ve had to read a book each semester. I didn’t do anything special before, but I think I’m going to be more careful when reading (like underlining) this time. It’s a relatively short book, and in an interest area of mine (Japanese history–The Hagakure), so maybe I’ll be able to approach it a bit less apprehensively.

Now, the Renaissance class is probably the heaviest workload. Last week, we had a map test on Italy. I took the study map the professor gave us, scanned it as an image, erased the names in an image editor, and printed blank maps to study from. I saved both as PDFs and put them on Evernote. I also used Foxit Reader to practice by annotating the blank map with the names of what we were supposed to know.

I still have to force myself to read, though. I thought about audiobooks, but for two reasons I doubt it would help much: for one, these are probably not going to be produced as audiobooks, and two: it feels like cheating. What I have been doing is trying to learn how to “speed read”. It’s not so much that I don’t like to read the books, but sometimes they’re dry, and a lot of the time I have other time constraints.

The App Store has some good free dictionaries too. I like the Merriam-Webster dictionary and WordWeb. They’ve been really handy for every class so far. I also use Lingoes, but it’s a desktop app.

And I tie all this together with the new site 750words.com.

There is a book, The Artist’s Way, that encourages a daily writing exercises of three pages, called the “morning pages”, about anything that comes to mind. It urges to use “longhand” (i.e., paper and pencil), but this site does it differently. The owner of the site has calculated that 750 words is the approximate equivalent of three handwritten pages. Instead of writing them, you type them. The site has some really neat stat-tracking about your word usage and emotional state, and even correlates your mood with the weather. There are badges to encourage you to keep writing. Sometime in the future, when I’m more motivated, I want to use this to write up synopses of class notes.

I’ve tried using “to-do” list apps, but I find they generally don’t help me. My favorite has been wunderlist, free and simple, but it seems they’re eventually moving toward forced registration.

This is by far the best-organized I’ve ever been. I love it. I have yet to see how well it will help when midterms and finals roll around, but I have a good feeling.

On Linux, both of these things are pretty easy to do using scrot or recordmydesktop. But there is no Windows port of them (that I’m aware of), and the similar software I did find either cost money (too much for something like this), or missed the mark (no other free screenshot software I found could do periodic screenshots).

So, I came up with PotShot. It’s stupid simple. I don’t know much of anything about C#, so I basically ripped the screenshot code from here, Googled some things, ripped some more people’s code (sorry!) and wrapped it up in this interface.

The big bold "PotShot" is there just to fill up empty space

All it does is take a screenshot at the interval that you set. It can do milliseconds, seconds, and minutes. There’s an option to tack on the date and time on the end of the image filenames, because VirtualDub can automatically sequence the images if they’re numbered, but it doesn’t seem to like having anything besides the number in the filename. I’ll have to experiment.

Bug: Hit “Start!”, then “Stop!”, then “Start!” again, and it generates two images instead of one, and (I believe) at the wrong interval. I’m working on that.

You can get it installed (thanks to the incredibly useful wizard in HM NIS Edit), or as a plain .exe in a .zip file.

I tried to lower the requirements, but I think it still needs .NET Framework 3.5. I’ll work on that too.

The source is a bit wonky at the moment because I was trying to do some things with it but I don’t have time now.

Download (currently on box.net):

• Installer (in a zipped folder)
• Zip (no installer)
• Source (zipped C# project)

Hopefully by the next couple versions:

• Automatically stop after a certain interval.
• Stealth mode + tray icon
• Command-line arguments (or just a command-line version)
• Fix that stupid bug I mentioned

Never let your mind drift to things it’s not ready to handle. Mine did, and I’m still suffering. If you can, avoid it. Because when you realize that we don’t have any meaning outside our little miniscule existence, it’s mindnumbing. It’s almost like dividing by zero for a computer. You get gridlocked into this one impossible-to-shake problem. And that’s where I am right now.

Everything else is evolving faster than the human mind can digest. But my mind refuses to let it go either.

It’s not for the popularity (obviously because I don’t have any), it’s not for the money or the fame or anything else. For me, this blog is important for two reasons.

The first is that I have a select friend who cares enough about me to read this stuff anyway. It’s kind of like by writing this, I’m talking to him, and whenever I talk to him, my real raw emotions tend to come out. By posting them here, anybody else can have access to and hopefully identify with some of what I feel. It’s a bold statement but I’d just about guarantee that whatever you’re going through, you’re not alone. I’m hoping somebody will see this and realize that we’re all suffering to some extent. Some of us may have it better off but the truth is we’re all locked into our own minds, and we’re all just trying to survive.

You are not alone in the world having panic attacks, or agoraphobia, or social phobia, or OCD, or anything else. There really are people out there who understand and are willing to help. I hope you can do that and don’t have to suffer with what I’ve dealt with lately.

Don’t be ashamed to need help. Being mentally healthy can make or break your life more than a physical illness can. Even if you’re the most capable at whatever you do physically, you’ll never be able to achieve anything if you’re too scared to try. It’s important to get help for these kinds of things. And I hope that people can realize that poor mental health is not necessarily an impossible hurdle to overcome. It only becomes impossible when you let it take hold of you.

Don’t let the fear eat you like it’s eaten me. Please. You can do this. You are a capable, amazing, kind-hearted person. That applies to anyone reading this.

You can make it.

The second (selfish) reason is simply that sharing my experience helps me “deal”. I don’t know why I don’t just keep a paper journal instead of blogging. After all, this kind of thing isn’t really public material, is it? Probably not, but it should be, because too many people suffer in silence with disorders that can be handled more readily than people may think.

I’m trying to encourage people to talk about their problems because it really helps “get things off your chest”. And you may not be nearly as far out as you think. See the Children Full of Life documentary, for example. Fourth grade children are learning empathy and compassion. They’re learning how to identify with other people’s problems. More people need to teach that. More people need to be like that. In a room full of people, chances are you have something in common with at least one of them, You may even become a closer group by virtue of you being less afraid to demonstrate how you really feel. I teared up watching that documentary. It’s a beautiful sign of maturity on the part of the children and the teacher.

If there’s no other listening ear in your life, there’s always a pen and paper. Or sand and a stick, or your voice in an empty room, or a blog (or even skywriting). It’s hard to do, but accept how you feel at the moment and roll with it. Take some deep breaths, maybe close your eyes, and really get to know who you are.

Sorry for that sounding so cheesy, but as one of my favorite high school English teachers wrote in one of my journal entries we had to keep, “it always is when you talk about stuff like this”.