Illusory Follies

It seems fairly obvious that trust is a pretty foundational aspect of any relationship. I don’t think many people disagree with me on that. It’s interesting though how few people are willing to accept what trust entails.

For example, the more you trust someone, the more their comments or suggestions are meaningful to you. A random stranger has little impact if they let you know how they feel about you. However, if it’s coming from a good friend it means so much more. Because a friends advice is more meaningful it can necessarily be more harsh or blunt. “You’ve got to do something with that shirt!” is a comment that you will take very differently depending on whether a good friend says it or some clerk at a store says it. Why does a friend say something that could possibly be taken as an offense? Because they care about you and they have enough “relationship capital” invested in you that they realize that they can say things without terminating their relationship. Once you think about it, you might likely agree with their “blunt” statement.

This is really the only way to grow and develop outside of introspection (which tends to justify your current condition whatever it is).

But so many people don’t seem to understand this. People cloud the idea of honesty (which is really what I’m talking about) with the idea of giving no offense. “It’s better if I don’t say anything” is a common line that people of this breed will say to avoid being honest. Obviously there’s a time and place for everything and there are certainly inopportune times to be honest. However, I think that in any good relationship (that of friends or family) that one should be honest. A friend is a worthless one who can’t build you up. Even worse, a friend who can’t approach you with what they perceive as a fault or problem will likely grow apart from you since they feel disconnected. They have to “watch what they say” around you. Eventually there develops a list of what can be said and what can’t. Conversations denegrate to a point of dancing around these issues without stepping on them. If you slip, you’ve just triggered a landmine and the relationship will likely terminate.

Sadly, being dishonest is largely what manners are about. You don’t tell fat people they’re fat. You don’t tell someone that they’re dressed in a style befitting a 1970’s disco star. Manners are not what keeps friendships together though — they are merely a social construct to avoid conflict (and they work well for that). You may not like your boss, but you are stuck working for him or her so you likely desire to avoid conflict at the expense of having a friendship. Friendships are all about conflict though and without conflict you again are stuck with never growing or expanding or improving.

I think the general rule should be:

With those that aren’t friends but with whom you must spend time or engage in activities with, you should be polite. Telling your boss that he’s a fatty might be true, [NB: My boss is NOT a fatty. He's a wonderful human being] but it serves no purpose to try to create a conflict when you have no real personal relationship with him.

With those that are family or friends (and I use that term to refer to close friends) you should be honest! A friend who cannot take suggestions or comments regarding their personal life must not trust you or perhaps is too short-sighted to see your motivation. Such a person is probably not (or not yet) in your group of friends.

There’s obviously a point at which people transition from group 1 to group 2 and during this time an ill-advised word can ruin a perfectly good start at a relationship. Trust must be established before you can seek to actually improve (and be improved by) your friends. Trust is shown by care and compassion and obvious evidence that the other party is interested not merely in themselves but in your best interest.

Some people seem incapable of trust and I really do think that for the most part, these people are doomed to walk the world without any real friends. If someone is not interested in growing (even if it hurts) they can avoid it quite successfully by never allowing those around them to make a difference in their lives.

I’ve been trying to focus on getting much more in-depth with GIS tools. Our project is preparing to deploy an ArcGIS solution from ESRI in the next year or so but there are so many other options out there (including some neat stuff like Google Earth’s whiz-bang servers). It’s neat stuff and right now ESRI is kind of dominating the market — mainly because their the only ones that offer such a huge enterprise-level system. Most other GIS tools have been developed for specific applications and for specific clients.

It’s a neat area to work in…

So… I spent a fair chunk of time last night getting the Grace OPC
website up and running again. There were some really weird problems
with Wordpress. It should have been a normal upgrade (which is only
slightly painful) but for some reason my FTP client (FileZilla) seems
to have a new bug that sometimes shuffles file names. So if you upload
files 1.txt, 2.txt, and 3.txt with “1″, “2″, and “3″ as the contents
respectively, you’ll end up mismatching values. All the DATA is there,
just not in the right file name. Obviously, when you’re talking
configuration scripts, this is mayhem. What a mess — I’m going to
browse and see if FileZilla has already listed this as a bug or what.
Is it possible this could be a server-side issue? (I’m running
ProFTPd)

Anyway — that’s all for now. My attempts to get Gentoo 2006.0
installed were only partially successful. The installer fails if you
don’t have an Internet connection (which is just weird because
although it may be obvious to others I’m not used to my installation
routine talking to the mother-ship. The reason I didn’t have Internet
was because support for my wireless driver (ipw2200) wasn’t installed
out of the box. Kind of a pain. I just need to plug it into the wired
network at home and “emerge” the package. Maybe my opinion will
improve. I’m sick of Fedora Core so hopefully this is an improvement.

I’ve upgraded (downgraded…?) to Wordpress. It’s a lot more customizable and it’s actually a pretty easy to use interface. The site definitely looks different now. I’m not loving it currently. So begins the hunt for a theme. Or maybe I should just customize this one. I don’t know. Suggestions?

My wife just informed me that she had a dream about “african people with scud missiles” running around in a scary mall. I find this amusing.

It seems like I just posted to this site and it’s actually been an entire week.

Lots to do — I’ve been playing around with some new geospatial software (ESRI’s GIS suite). I’ll be writing some add-on functionality to it over the next year for work. Fun stuff but a lot of material.

I’ve been struggling to get printing to work at home. I was trying to use CUPS to share a printer on my Mac. In theory I should have been able to connect to the printer from my Windows XP laptop but it doesn’t quite work. When I was troubleshooting the issue I found a number of people who had exactly the same problem with no clear-cut solution. It’s a feature. I just wonder whether it’s Apple’s or Microsoft’s fault. My guess is Microsoft.

I’ve puttered around a little bit with touching up some webpages as well as correcting some mistakes (I had DNS misconfigured for every single domain on my virtual dedicated server). I added Scuttle to my server so that I can have my own list of bookmarks that are easily retrievable and centrally stored. It’s very much like Del.icio.us but you’re not subject to their ridiculous downtimes and slow connections. I like. You can see it here.

I also got my calendar server up and running again. It’s using PHPICalendar to display iCal files (that I can edit using either my Mac or Mozilla Sunbird). Also pretty neat. I had been running it before but I’ve upgraded to the new version. I also hope to actually use the darn thing this time. You can see it in action here. I need to add my stuff to it — for now it’s just U.S. Holidays. The important thing is that I’ve confirmed it works! You expected me to actually post my boring schedule?

I’m looking into Mac-on-Linux. I just got a new hard drive for my Mac in order to support mirroring the primary drive and I was planning on blowing away the original installation in order to try this out and also to get some annoying issues fixed (from when I dorked around a little too much and messed some things up in OS X). At the very least, I want the ability to dual-boot on my Mac.

All for now,

This sites now hosted on my very own virtual dedicated server. The performance so far has been great and it’s nice to be able to tweak virtually anything. It’s kind of still like renting and you can get in trouble if you break things too much but as long as you don’t bother your neighbors and you pay your bills, it’s no big deal. Unfortunately there are some restrictions (for example I can’t really run my own mail server due to spam concerns). Not a big deal though…

I’m planning to add some features like a jabber server and some “portal” type applications. I’ve already got a web proxy frontend installed and a social bookmarking client (called Scuttle) installed. Fun stuff. At some point, I’ll be able to consolidate all of my work onto a single server.

I’ve got to finish studying up on my German (I got nothing done this week so I’m cramming again).

More later,