Online bill payments

OK, you know you have spent to much time online when you are willing to transfer money through a bunch of accounts just so you don't have to drive the 3 minutes to the bank.

It is an interesting phenomena, this online banking. I have been using it for years and I am at the point that I will not hold a credit card or open a bank account unless I can access the information online and download it into Quicken. For that matter, I will not even write a check unless I can print it out from Quicken. Financially I am a slave to technology. And yet, for the most part I am alright with this fact.

I have a copy of the program safe and sound in the pile of computer software that I would need WHEN not if my computer crashes. I have a copy of the data on a flash drive that I keep in my fireproof safe. Which means that anyone who is devious enough could find out pretty much everything about me financially if they can get through the layers of passwords and encryption I have added beyond what is offered by Quicken.

The biggest problem is that I have to remember about 20 different passwords. That can get a bit frustrating when I can't remember one of them. I am so paranoid that I won't write them down. Sure, most banks will let you rest the password but often they want you to wait for the new temp password to arrive via snail mail. Ahg. So I guess that is incentive not to forget the passwords.

All in all, online banking ROCKS! I am never past due, I know exactly how much money I don't have, and I can tell you exactly where I spent that last $100.00 because Quicken will be happy to create a report, build grafts, and even scold me for going over budget.

So, who needs those debt consolidation/repair people. Just get Quicken and put in all your numbers. It will be happy to make you feel stupid for over-spending.

Cheers.

New Priorities

I've often thought of writing blog entries as a form of torture. It's not so much that I can't write a cohesive message in a short entry. But rather it is because I find it to be physically painful. One would think that it would be easy to just use voice recognition software. However, I have found that it is not as easy to use voice recognition software as it sounds like it would be in theory. As a result I have been very resistant to online blogging.

A funny thing happened last night. I found myself finally understanding why it is that blogging is so very important. A friend of mine called me on the phone and told me that she was worried about me because she hadn't heard anything in a while. I assumed that this was because we hadn't spoken on the phone. But then she commented, “You haven't written any blogs lately”. This is true because I haven't written a blog since my birthday and ever since that time, I have been in significant pain.

Chronic pain is not like acute pain. It acts in a completely different way. Chronic pain comes with a bunch of baggage such as; bemoaning the fact that it hurts or compromising what things get done and what things don't get done. I had chosen to focus on research for papers, and coordinating and presenting findings for my fieldwork presentations. As a result, I simply didn't have enough energy or pain tolerance left over to use for writing a blog.

It's never easy to make choices about what you're going to do and what you're going to let slide, especially at the graduate school level. Unfortunately, there is only so much time and there is only so much pain I can tolerate. As a result, I had to make a difficult choice. I chose not to focus on blogging. So this is my makeup blog. I don't expect for it to make up for missing entries, but since I actually have readers, I offer you my apologies for my absence.

All that being said, with one phone call I was reminded about how online communities function on an emotional level. My friend was concerned for my well-being, because she hadn't heard from me. Although we also know each other in real life, it was my absence online that led to her concern. This emotional umbilical that occurs between community members through online entries is powerful. Without a steady stream of entries it is impossible for community members to maintain an online connection. That may be very obvious, in theory, but this was an occasion where it became very real to me.

So I thank my muse, Liz, for calling me and reminding me how my missing blogs were noticed by someone. Not just any someone, but rather a member of my community.

Socialized Gambling?

There is this nifty new product I just found out about called ShuffleUp Cards where you shuffle the cards in a candy dish. Sounds a little wacky when put like this, but I really think this is genius. My hat goes off to the inventor.

Why? you might ask do I think so highly of this product. Well, let me tell you. As an occupational therapist I work with kids that do not have great socialization skills. I have also worked with 85 year old vets that just want to remember the good old days. A friend of mine works with people with recent brain injuries. These cool little chip like cards are fun for the kids, easy to get a hold of for arthritic or hands that need a little extra coaxing from the brain. Not only do they not need shuffling, it would defeat the purpose. I have just ordered a set so I will have to get back to you whether or not they perform as advertised. I will also give my 7-10 year old clients an opportunity to destroy them. I figure if they are hardy enough to take it this will be a permanent addition to my OT bag of tricks.

Media connections

Yesterday Jim Cramer focused his show Mad Money on how to invest: the basics. Something he said that resonated with me and both Comm classes, was the idea of how to identify a top or bottom of the market for a particular stock i.e., company. My understanding of his theory was that if everybody is in agreement then the tide is about to change. So, I guess that means I should buy a house because everyone seems to agree that the housing market sucks.

'When everybody agrees' is a really scary idea. It would be one thing to say that most people agree but how do you actually get everybody to agree. I bet you could still find someone that would argue the earth is flat and the sun is a chariot. I know that Cramer was not talking about everybody literally but it is an interesting idea. If everybody agreed then there would be no change, no movement, no life left in anything.

So if the market has consensus then there is no reason for the price to change. We all agree. That is the price. That is the answer. Done. Over. Life would suck all the way around if we all agreed. The worst part is that we would all agree that it sucked.

Invention, creation, motivation comes from the friction caused by disagreement. In fact what Cramer is really saying is cause friction, be disagreeable, move counter-intuitively so the market will continue to move.

The point is... be the leader and change directions despite what EVERYBODY says.

Masquerade paper faces on parade…

In the musical the Phantom of the Opera the first song in the second half is called Masquerade. This song comes at a point in the musical where the opera company has been closed for the off season and they are having a party to bring in the new season.

That being said… the song itself is a wonderful song about how people are walking around pretending to be something they are most certainly not. The title of this blog is the first line of the lyrics. Masquerade Paper faces on parade Masquerade, take a look there’s another mask behind you…

This struck me as so closely related to our classes. I say classes because both classes have discussed the topic of user identities and how they relate to the person on the other side of the keyboard. In Dmitri’s class we discussed how the users are able to take on a user identity. This identity is like that paper mask. If you already know someone, then you are not likely to be fooled by a paper mask. You see past it, beyond the paper and fill in the person’s features that are obscured.

I think this happens online with user ID’s as well. When you know the person on the other side of the keyboard you are able to fill in and see around the obscured information. You can see how that person really is, but someone who doesn’t know this person, would be prevented from really knowing them at least initially because of the paper mask. The mask creates a step of removal that can at least give the person the illusion of anonymity if not actual anonymity. I know this issue of actual vs. imagined anonymity could be debated but to do so would be beyond the scope of this blog.

The song continues and in true operatic style there are many little side ‘conversations’ that occur to clue the audience as to what has happened while they were out having a cocktail at intermission. This seems to also relate to the behaviors that people display online. In most chat formats, there is a way for people to converse outside the group so they can have private conversations. This behavior provides a more intimate knowledge about the person and creates additional emotional links therefore further investing the person into the website. By the way, in the musical this also creates an emotional hook for the audience to help them to reengage into the story line… the cocktail doesn’t hurt either.

Then there is the Troll, who messes up the whole party. This person comes in to the party and disrupts all the activity that has been going on and redirects all attention onto him… please tell me you know who this is in the musical. Through the use of a much more elaborate disguise, the Phantom is able insinuate himself into the conversations without fear of discovery of his true nature underneath. In the online world this also occurs and it usually takes significant effort to alleviate the original participants of the troll’s interference.

I think this analogy is very interesting and I could probably delve deeper into the psycho-social implications that it raises… but I am out of time and the show must continue on!

…and the lucky shrimp goes straight through to the Sheller…

That was what he said… really!

These were my brother’s words when I was eavesdropping on his conversation with his classmates.

My brother is working toward an MBA from the University of Florida via an on-line program. He was utilizing a couple of programs to have a group session with his classmates, who happen to live in different parts of the country. His emphatic declaration that it would be that shrimp’s lucky fate to end up getting to the Sheller first that highlighted the fact that it is easy to forget about all the technology that is being utilized and focus on the task at hand – shelling that lucky shrimp.

The group session occurred on a Sunday afternoon. They were using Elluminate and Scype to show each other parts of their assignment and talk as if they were in the same room. My brother was working with his classmates on a distribution problem and he was emphatic that his analysis of the problem was correct. He was vehemently defending his argument because one of his cohorts did not understand why some shrimp were ‘luckier’ than others.

I had been curious about how his classes worked with the technology the school had given them, as well as, how the lectures worked and felt. He told me that the navigation of the technology was easier than he had expected. I must qualify this with a comment that he is VERY tech savvy. I asked him what it was like taking classes online. He said that it was different to view an online lecture and then do the homework before meeting with his classmates to discuss the answers and then return a finished product to his instructor. He indicated that it wasn’t any more difficult than a normal class, just different.

I was also interested in how he felt about developing working relationships with his classmates. He said that he is not as close has he has been with other classmate settings. This is consistent with what we discussed in class with Dmitri about how 1:1 contact is always likely to be the best form of communication. That being said, it would seem that being able to hear the emphasis in my brother’s voice impacted the other participants. This would not have been possible in a setting such as just text base communication such as IM. It is also possible that seeing the calculations in tandem with the vocal inflection was the persuasive mitigating factor.

For me, it was the fact that the shrimp was going to be scampi sooner. (P.S. I was hungry)

OT Stories

Last year I took a class for my MA in OT called Story Making. The general idea behind the whole class was to recognize that all stories have certain elements with the purpose of getting an idea from one person to another. We focused mostly on how to understand and interpret both spoken and unspoken language to understand our patient’s need. In hindsight, I find it funny that there would seem to be a whole school centered on this idea.

Maybe it seems like an “err, duh,” but I had not linked the idea of communications with therapeutic story making, until now.

In class, we spoke about how drama is comprised of peripeteia and resolution. We focused on how to translate the actions and minimal words of a 4-year-old autistic child into an understandable need. We focused on helping an older adult who struggled with the idea of never living alone again. We focused on how to tell a mother how to feed her preemie child after the child is having trouble eating. These are all roles of occupational therapists. My focus going into this program was to help OT’s communicate amongst themselves and with those outside the field.

What I had not thought about was how vast and impactful communication is in our lives. It had not occurred to me that the mere positioning of houses on a street would influence how the community would interact. I had not thought about how I was going to communicate the design of my on-line community to programmers, or how to design it so it would accomplish the vision I have in my head.

So, I am sitting here, reading and writing about communication and some of its facets, trying to get my head around the fact that the basic function and design of the space right down to the font kerneling can have far reaching affects on my community’s ability to perform the lofty goals I have set out to accomplish. I am in awe of those who have already done this for their niche communities.

Nevertheless, for now, I have to take it one-step at a time and focus on understanding the successes and failures of those who have gone before me, and try to learn from their choices. I will find the resolution to this peripeteia, I assure you. I might die in the process. And yet, as many of my friends will attest, I am far too stubborn and I have come too far in my life for a mere website to take me down.