fplanque: glob

19 out of 20 people who attempt suicide will fail.

But people who fail are 37 times more likely to succeed the second time…

At TEDYou, JD Schramm asks to break the silence surrounding suicide and suicide attempts:

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I had this epiphany the other day that everything about life, and even more so: everything about about human activities is deeply based on feedback loops.

It starts with natural evolution (including sexual selection) where the evolution and shaping of the species is refined generation after generation based on positive and negative feedback loops from the environment and from peers.

Then, there is so much about human psychology and sociology where ideas and behaviors are reinforced or subdued through feedback loops.

Not to mention the global economy, markets, consumption and speculation that are massively driven by feedback loops…

So, what’s left to pure, unbiased free will? Arts? Love? Thoughts? I don’t think so. It’s pretty easy to find feedback loops in all of these too!!

This doesn’t mean that everything about today is a direct result of what happened yesterday; there are still external stimuli that enter the system at any (random) time, but still… what is the external stimulus allowing for unconditioned thoughts?

I upgraded my iPad to iOS 4.3 and gave the Home Sharing feature a quick try.

You have to go into Settings > iPod and enter your Apple ID before you can use Home Sharing. I have several Apple IDs… I just entered one and it seems to work.

Once you do that, the video app on the iPad will show a new tab named “Shared". Tap that and you’ll see your computers running iTunes. Tap one… and watch a stupid spinning wheel while it loads the content… the first time it’s way too long… and in subsequent times it’s still too long to be practical… after that you can actually stream video wirelessly and flawlessly.

I am disappointed about teh way you access your videos though. It requires way too many taps and too much waiting.

On the iPod app, I find it even less practical. You actually don’t see where your shared stuff is. You need to tap on “Library” to open a popup menu where you can see your computers. There again, spinning wheels and delays. Bleh…

I don’t really know what to make of this… yeah maybe watch podcasts in bed on the iPad… oh wait, I turn off my computers at night… hum…

No, what I’d really want is actually the opposite, I’d like to stream the shit out of my iPhone when I’m at work!! I don’t have my iTunes library on my work computer, so I guess it would be nice if it would just wirelessly access my iPhone, but no, it doesn’t work that way round. You can’t stream from device to computer.

What sort of works though, is to connect the iPhone to the computer and stream through the câble. But that feature was already there before iOS 4.3.

So yeah, Home Sharing: it works but I don’t know what to do with it :p

I’ve been explaining this to people over and over again and I reached the point where I just want to point them to a web page to read through before we can talk some more about it :p

So here it is, in a nutshell, the whole deal about Google and Facebook competing to hire the best engineers and develop the ultimate social network. This is also the deal about Google Buzz, Google Wave and Google whatever other products they pimp these days… including personalized search and maps.

What Facebook and Google want, is to get as much personal information as they can to better profile you as a consumer.

Ideally, they’ll try to do that by looking good. For example: they don’t really push you to volunteer info about your age, place of residence, etc. Instead they merely let you share your thoughts about getting married, or going on vacation, or buying a new car, or considering a new diet, or what not with your friends… but don’t kid yourself, all these status updates, they are basically strings of very meaningful keywords… and they are being analyzed! Right Now!

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Things on the Mac is my favorite GTD style to-do list manager. Their major drawback though, was lack of decent sync between multiple devices.

Well, they finally acknowledged the issue and promise cloud based sync to be available in a few months.

In the meantime, I move the Things DB to dropbox (launch the app while holding down the ALT key to do this). This at least lets me open the DB from different computers. But it can’t handle concurrent edits, so be careful what you do! :p

Regarding iPhone & iPad, you gotta manually launch the app over & over again while on the same WiFi network for your stuff to sync… can’t wait for this to end!!