This post was originally written in August of 2009. The concepts still remain true. I have since added rule number 4 in 2013. You can find that one at https://bradfordbenn.com/new-year-new-rule/. I am always reviewing the rules. These rules still apply for me.

I was chatting with friends over some fine adult beverages and talking about one of their blog posts. I shared with them my three rules for life; and they said I had to write about them, so that is this entry. Some people have heard these rules before, but that points to the importance and applicability of the rules for many many years now. So here are the three rules:

  1. I am not prejudiced, I hate everyone equally.
  2. If you are not sleeping with me, I don’t care who you are sleeping with.
  3. Don’t see anyone you work with, without their pants on

So at times it seems like these don’t really make sense until you start thinking about them as they actually apply in daily life. Let’s take a look at each rule.

I am not prejudiced, I hate everyone equally.

This one is fairly self explanatory; it is my sarcastic/sardonic take on “treat everyone equally”. It seems simple, but you would be amazed at how often people forget that everyone is a person to some degree. My recent trips have reinforced that opinion. I was on a plane full of people flying to LA and there were many children on the plane, all of them – no matter the race, ethnicity, nationality …etc – had trouble using their inside voices and respecting others. So I disliked them all on the plane, as all that I wanted to do was work and then sleep since I couldn’t work. It did not matter their background, they all annoyed me. So it kind of shows how one has to look past the outer skin and see the person for their behaviors and actions; that is what one should be judged on.

If you are not sleeping with me, I don’t care who you are sleeping with.

Everyone kind of goes, “huh?” to this one. However I have found that many people talk about others romantic life and activities. This can be such phrases as “I can’t believe that she is going out with him…” “That person is gay” “I can’t believe that they are getting married” etc. My answer is that I just don’t care, I have other things to worry about. Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston getting married, then getting divorced, then Angelina… etc. well how does that impact me? Why should I worry about it. That is one level. The other one is the amount of time people spend gossiping about others personal life. An example being the amount of conversations that was garnered when my wife went out with a male coworker when she worked at the same company. Let’s see I trust my wife, I know the person she went to lunch with, I know he is in a relationship… etc. so why should I care – let alone anyone else I work with. This plays into the other item, he happens to be gay, but since he isn’t sleeping with me and isn’t sleeping with my wife – why should I care who he is sleeping with. But this causeed a huge stir of gossip at my office. Now to follow this completely, since I sleep with my wife I would care if she was sleeping with someone else.

Don’t see anyone you work with, without their pants on

This one applies in two ways, one obvious and one not so obvious. Now before I go into this, in the previous paragraph the astute reader will notice that my wife was working at the same place as I am. However she got the job as a temp after we moved up because of me – so it doesn’t really apply. Also she was in a different part of the building and I would only see here once a day – heck we didn’t even carpool due to the different work schedules. The rest of it still applies, don’t mess around at work. I do not know of many that it has ended well for. That does not mean that people can not meet at work, develop a relationship and then one of them leaves the job – I know many that it has worked for. And there also the case like I had where there is no interaction during the work day, they founded the company together… etc. The other one is that at the end of the day, especially when traveling for work, one wants to be able to get away from work. So when traveling having to share a hotel room with someone is something I won’t do anymore. It also reinforces not to bring work discussion “home” if you are involved with a coworker. I need some time off.

Now that you have seen the rules, I am not going to say that they apply for everyone, each person has to find their own code and rules to live by. These are the ones that work for me. Obviously I can continue to explain how these rules may or may not apply – but they are my rules. Just like an opinion, they can’t be wrong; they can be malformed, objectionable to others, based on incorrect assumptions/ascertions/beliefts …etc. but they can not be wrong.

I have a fourth rule that is currently under review, has been for a couple of years which I am still testing the application… so who knows there might be an addition.

I have gotten a Playstation3, I also have PS2, PS1, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo GameBoy, Windows, and Mac. So to so I have various gaming environments. So there have been some games that are available on multiple platforms and I have had a chance to try a few of them. On the PS2 I enjoy playing the SSX series of games. It is an EA Sports game and fairly fun. So when I saw it available at a reasonable price for the Nintendo Wii I figured I would try SSX Blur.

I was surprised at how different it was compared to the other versions. I realize that part of it is the change in the controller interface. The programmers I think were trying to use the advanced control options of having the accelerometers control the trick interface. For instance rather than use the controller as an analog for the board alignment, rather one has to shake the controller in a pattern to pull a trick. However it is not intuitive.To do a trick, one draws a heart with both controllers; there is one for each hand.A completely different experience than pressing square while using the D-Pad.

There are times that the accelerometers do work wonders, most often when used as an analog for another control. For example I downloaded a demo for the Playstation3 of a golf game. It was abysmal compared to the Wii Sports Golf where one uses the Wii Controller as a golf club. So it proves that it is not the controller that is flawed, but rather the application of the interface and technology.

I also downloaded a demonstration version of Civilization for the PS3. I really enjoy playing it on the computers (both Mac and PC), so I figured it could be cool on the PS3. However I was surprised at how different the experience was between using the computer screen and mouse and using the video game interface and the screen resolution. It was just not as familiar and intuitive to me. Perhaps it was the fact that I am used to something else.

I think it just goes to prove that the interface has to be adjusted to the environment that it is being used within. So the interface for a video game that one has to look at a large area, such as Civilization, having more control over the view is the key. The use of a controller for a sports game, the control use should be analogous to the way the object on screen is moving. This has not always been the case, such as why does pressing the “X” button cause the object to jump, that dissociation is easier to compensate for than drawing a heart in space makes the object flip upside down.

After all that, all that I have to say is don’t assume that the experience will always be the same as the human interface changes.

I am about two months in on changing from my personal Windows laptop that was showing its five years of use. It was having stuck pixels and it was slow. It does not support WPA encryption, it has two megabytes of memory, an 80GB hard drive, and well it has had a rough life. So the L&T Jennifer got me a MacBook Pro at the end of July, 2007. It has been a little bit more of a change than I expected to migrate operating systems.

On the plus side, iTunes is a lot more integrated with the OS than it is with Windows. This is not really that surprising given that the iPod and iTunes was designed to sell more Macintosh computers. I have found that iTunes and iPod synchronization is a little better than it is on the Windows machines. Now as to what the differences are, that is harder to quantify but I perceive the differences to be a few things. It seems that the iPod sync process is faster on the Mac. I am using the USB port on both operating systems. Yes, I know that USB is a standard and the speed should be the same but the Mac OS seems to be faster to the iPod. Yes, they are both USB 2.0. It also seems to handle using the iPod as a disk better than Windows does.

On the negative side, it seems that stuff is too integrated into using the Apple software and the .mac service. An example of this is trying to send a page from Safari using Microsoft Entourage results in an error window saying that one can only send the link, not the content.

Why I am using Entourage you may ask, well to be honest I am not 100% sure. When I installed Microsoft Office it installed with it. I might try migrating over to Mail to see if it is any better. What is interesting is what happens when one gets a file with a PowerPoint included. When I double clicked it to open in Entourage, the result was a window telling me that I had to authorize iWork.

Click for larger image
Click for larger image

Kind of interesting that it did not just open up PowerPoint. Rather I had to save the file and then open it through PowerPoint. It appears to me that the way the software association is setup is that one should just be using the Apple software or else it is not as integrated.

Then comes the fun of the Internet. I am still looking for a good FTP client. I have tried a few and well they all seem to have their little flakiness. I am still looking for a good client. I think that the next one I am going to look at is FileZilla as I am pretty happy with it on the Windows machines. Of course next I have to figure out what the version to use is. I also have found that Safari does not work as well as Firefox on some websites. An example is the control panel for my website, this includes the admin panel as well as Blog entries. Also Safari does not work with the Google toolbar, which I have gotten to like quite a bit. The chat stuff seems to work better on the Mac, but that is mainly due to iChat and Adium. I highly recommend Adium, I like it better than Trillian that I use on the Windows machines.

I am very happy though with the speed of Adobe Creative Suite 3 under Macintosh instead of Windows. I am comparing it to my work laptop which is about equal in power. It just seems to work faster.

I am a little disappointed by some of the stuff that is not as available on the Mac. I can not find a mapping software package that works with Mac. So I have a Garmin GPS but if I get rid of my Windows machine I will have no way to program it or load maps. I also have not been able to find a batch download program for SmugMug.

I have already purchased VMWare’s Fusion but still have not pulled the trigger on installing it yet, cause I have to have an install CD of Windows XP and all my XP installs are OEM and I am not 100% sure that they will work.

What is interesting is that while talking with the L&T Jennifer, she is not having any of these issues. I think that is mostly because I am a little bit more of a power user. Maybe the Mac is a better personal machine and Windows is a better work/power user machine.

Back to looking at FTP clients so I can download my website to back it up before doing a major update…