Culture of Stress

I was reading an article on Slashdot today. This is not unusual in and of itself. However, this one asked a question about the relationship between technology and stress. The comments were the usual Slashdot drivel with the odd insightful or interesting comment thrown in. All this got me thinking about stress in the modern technological society.

As I thought about it in the back of my mind as I read through comment after comment, I realized that technology is not the problem. People have an expectations about technology which have a much more direct causal relationship to stress. We, not unreasonably, expect technology to work. But we also unreasonably expect technology to be able to solve every single problem immediately. Or sooner. In addition, we expect that technology somehow never fails. We expect that it will know just exactly what we mean. In short, we expect it to be more than a set of tools. This is unreasonable. Unreasonable expectations usually cause stress since if it’s unreasonable, it likely will not be met.

Expectations are not the whole of problem, however. Everyone seems to have these expectations. Even the people that know the expectations are unreasonable persist in having them. Obviously, there must be a reason for this.

It seems to me that most often when a new technology is created, there are people who expect that it is somehow a magic bullet for some situation. There are always unreasonable expectations for new technologies. This is only natural because the new technology is, after all, unknown. Its limits and its capabilities are not known. Initially, even the inventors will not know. It is, therefore, reasonable that there will be a period of time during which unreasonable expectations may be expected.

Another problem with a new technology is that while expectations may be reasonable, the implementation may not be capable of meeting them. As time passes, better implementations will be created which will have better capabilities. Over time, as experience with a particular technology increases, the gap between expecatation and capability tends to narrow. As this happens, more and more people are comfortable with what a technology can do and they use the tool for an appropriate purpose.

During the period of time where expectations regularly exceed capability, anyone using the technology would tend to expect more than can be delivered and will end up causing themselves stress over it. Either that or they will give up on it entirely or reduce their expectations significantly. Similarly, people who expect little will periodicallly be surprised and raise their expectations as capabilities are demonstrated. This category tends to have less stress with new technology.

Now all of this would be relatively minor if a new technology was introduced slowly and only used by people who understood the potential applications of such technology. And, historically, new technologies have been relatively slow to catch on. This allowed people to get used to technologies and adapt to their use. This would reduce the overall stress that technology would cause.

Now consider the modern technological society. Consider the rate at which new innovations and technologies are screaming onto the stage. Consider also that many of these technologies are based on nearly ubiquitous technologies. Many are simply outgrowths of well known technologies.

For the sake of discussion, let us consider the telephone. Most people reading this will know what a telephone does. Most people have some idea how to operate a standard telephone set to make a call and to receive a call. Now consider that a telephone can only do those two tasks. Now we start adding features to the telephone, such as caller id, hands free operation, hold, and so on. But each of these features has a clear interface and does not interfere with the basic operatoin of a telephone. Thus, most people have relatively little trouble dealing with it since the telephone does what they expect it to do. This is because the telephone has been around for long enough for people to get used to it.

Now consider the personal computer. Some people expect it to do their taxes, balance their chequebook, write to their grandmother, mow the lawn, and so on. Well, most people probably don’t expect it to mow the lawn. However, most people don’t know what it can’t do. They expect that it can somehow magically do anything. In fact, they somehow even expect it to know what they meant when it does the precise wrong thing they told it to do. They have not made the connection that just like dialling a wrong number on a telephone connects you to the wrong party, giving the wrong instructions to a computer will not provide the intended result.

Some of the expectations people have about computers can be excused by ignorance. Eventually, people will learn what a computer can do and what it can’t. Or that’s the theory anyway. Can anyone who is reading this state authoritatively what it is reasonable to expect a computer to do? Probably not. I can say that it is reasonable to expect a computer to be able to store and retrieve information. And I can expect it to be able to do arithmetic. But is it reasonable to expect it to solve a differential equation? Or identify grandma in a crowd? Or know what I’m saying? Or thinking? Or perhaps to retrieve "that document that I wrote the other day but which I never finished and I don’t know where I put it and it is partly about my dog Joe?"?

While the above problem can be put to rest with people simply becoming more familiar with computers and lowering their expectations, there is another factor. We just don’t know what the limits of computers are. That’s right. It seems that every day, someone is making a computer do even more fantastic and seemingly improbably things. People have just come to expect this since it has been happening for so long. And by extension, all other technology is expected to do the same thing. Never mind whether the new fangled feature is useful, it just better have it. And it better work. And it better be in my computer. And my friend’s computer. And the computer at the public library. And my telephone. And my car stereo. And my socks.

Then, there’s the fact that people are telling us that a computer can do this or that or the other thing. But they haven’t figured out how to make it do that quite right. So when we get the widget that makes the computer do some task and it fails to do so, we are disappointed. But we also expected it to work and were counting on it. So we planned on it working. Now we have stress because it didn’t work. And this completely ignores every more inferior implementations of some tasks where expectations are reasonable for the computer but the software fails to perform.

So now, with a single invention, we have the usual new invention stresses. But we also have the stress of inferior implementations getting worse rather than better. We have a technology where whole industries have been created to manufacture expectations, most of which will never be met. Yet we persist in buying into them even as we get burnt time after time. This is probably due to wishful thinking and an apparently recent failure in people to apply common sense to anything. After all, computers are supposed to make life easier so why should we have to put any effort into understanding them?

Now the same type of operation has been shifting into other technological fields. Now people expect ever more features from their toaster ovens, automobiles, telephones, shoes, eyeglasses, windows, furnaces, and socks. And whole industries have sprung up to provide these features, most often at the expense of the basic functionality or comprehensibility of the base object. And, of course, because only a finite number of items can be produced, the simplest form of many items simply disappears forcing people to get the newest piece of confusion every time something breaks.

So we are all now on a treadmill. We constantly feel that if we fall off, we’ll never get back on so we simply keep buying the newest thing and fretting because we don’t understand it. When we do understand it, we fret about being too far behind the front lines. Then we fret about fretting. And worry about what technology is doing to us. Then we worry about what worrying is doing to us. Then we worry about how it’s all pointless. And, to cap it all off, we worry about what we would do if we weren’t worrying about everything. All of which causes stress.

In short, we have, with modern technology, managed to create a culture of stress. What a long winded way to ramble into a conclusion, eh? Now you’re worried that you spent too long reading this diatribe. And you’re stressed over the fact that you now have ten minutes less to fret about that project at the office tomorrow. If you’re not worried, then, just maybe, you’ve got it beat.

But is there really a causal link between technology and the culture of stress? Personally, I don’t think so. Think about it. What actually causes stress? Expectations. In particular, unreasonable expectations. Expecting a computer to be able to understand your emotional state, for example, is currently an unreasonable expectation. Similarly, expecting Microsoft to make software that doesn’t crash randomly is currently unrealistic. Expecting everything to be done just so with no margin for error is immensely unrealistic.

And there, we get right down to the crux of the stress culture. Here we have created, with the aid of all our technology, a culture where everything has to be done according to strict timelines and closely regulated. Resources must be allocated as frugally as possible. So now, on top of stressing over technology, we stress about how we don’t have time to do everything. We stress about how technology makes things harder because we don’t know how the technology works. We stress about stressing about things. And so on.

Why do we do this? As far as I can see, we do this because everyone else does. That’s right. We have become so rapt in our tightly controlled worlds that we simply expect everyone else to be too. And because everyone else expects us to be, we continue to be. And we label anyone who is not rapt a nonconformist or a disruptive influence. We teach children from the cradle that we must achieve ever more than before.

Now to the point of this whole rant, really, is just to make the following statement:

Technology is not the cause of the culture of stress. We are.

The solution to the problem should be self evident. If it isn’t, take fifty steps back from your job, computer, cellphone, and so on and think about it.

The Great Apartment Cleanup III

Back in December and November I wrote about my great project to clean up the junk in my apartment. Since then, I’ve made some progress. However, I now have some additional motivation since I will be moving in April. One kind of has to leave the place reasonably tidy when one moves out.

I have now tidied up the bedroom, living room, and the kitched. In the process, I have removed an absolutely astoundingly mindbogglingly hugely gigantically bigly hugely big pile of rubbish. It’s astounding, really, how much junk of various descriptions a person can cram into 6000 cubic feet. I can now say that I have made some progress.

Unfortunately, I haven’t quite finished yet. You all can guess which bit is left to do, can’t you?

In the Spirit of Sharing

The other day I read about the Creative Commons licensing scheme. At least one author has put up entire novels under this license and still managed to sell physical books. This got me to thinking, and that is always a dangerous thing.

I have been writing stories for a while now and have created several short stories and have several novel sized projects in the works. Now, I have no illusions that I will get rich writing fiction. Yet, when you get right down to it, what’s the point of writing fiction if nobody ever reads it? I mean, I may go my entire life without being published in a physical medium. While I might end up getting published after my own death, I won’t be around to see what people think of my work.

Fortunately, I don’t have to be published on dead trees for my work to be published. I mean, the very same medium that lets you read this collection of ramblings loosely called a blog gives me a cheap method of publishing any other works I choose. In fact, it costs me pretty much nothing since I already have the web site up and running.

The creative commons license provides the final piece of the puzzle. Simply putting something up on the web is trivial. However, I want everyone to be able to print out copies of the stories, give them to friends, and so on. But I wanted to make it clear that I did not want anyone to change the content or make money off it. This ruled out the public domain but without tagging it somehow, there is no legal way for people to copy the document. Enter the creative commons license.

I have chosen to make selected works of my fiction available under the creative commons on my web site. You can find the page here. I have put up the first story as of this writing. I hope you all enjoy. Even if you don’t, pass it on to your friends; maybe they will.

Well, I’m off to bask in the glow of knowing that I have contributed to the creative output of the human race.

The Slashdot Effect and Site Owners

Many folks will be familiar with the slashdot effect whereby a site gets linked from slashdot and falls over dead under the load as many thousands of Slashdot readers follow the link. A good definition of the pheonomenon is provided in the Jargon File under, oddly enough, the entry for "slashdot effect". The term slashdot effect has taken on a somewhat more generic connotation and doesn’t always refer to Slashdot specifically. This generic term is used in this discussion.

Many site owners would love to be on the receiving end of a slashdotting. But at the same time, the dread it. Who should be responsible for protecting a site from such an effect? Indeed, these questions are raised by a recent twofold slashdotting. On February 3, Google had a special logo commemorating Julia fractals. Clicking on the link yielded a number of search results, a couple of which pointed to one server in Australia. This clobbered the site. Then two days later, Slashdot notices and posts a story about it and the poor site gets clobbered again but this time by actual Slashdot readers. Their own description of the events is here. Interested readers should also follow the link to the followup story.

The page referenced above askes a few hard questions. These include the following:

  • Should Google ask permission before doing something like this?
  • Should a site directing a lot of traffic in one direction take steps to rate limit it?
  • Whose responsibility is it to protect against this sort of scenario?

Obviously, I have a take on these questions or I wouldn’t be writing this. So, without further ado, my discussion of these questions.

First, should Google, or any other site, ask permission before directing traffic in large volumes to a particular site? It seems to me that there are two dimensions to this question. First, is not the very fact that a web page is publicly visible tacit permission for people to look at it? And, by extension, is it not tacit permission for someone else to link to it? After all, isn’t this the point of the web in the first place? But then, one could argue that just putting up a page on the web does not mean that I am willing to handle a massive flood of traffic. Should I be notified when someone makes such a link to my site so I can take steps to deal with it if neceessary? How would they necessarily know that they would be clobbering my site? In a dynamic database like a search engine, how would they know that one particular site is going to get clobbered?

My answer to all of that is this: no site should require permission to link to another site under any circumstances. If the information is not intended for public consumption, it should be protected against the casual browser. In the case of a static link from one site to another, it should be a matter of courtessy to notify destination site of the link, especially if the source site is busy and the destination site is not known to be able to handle the possible click throughs. My reasoning is simply that putting up a site for public consumption is an implicit approval for the public to look at it. And talk about it. And point their friends at it. And so on.

On to the second question. Should a large site take steps to rate limit the traffic that clicks through its link? This is a different animal all together. This depends heavily on the nature of the site. For example, Google, who tries to provide the most relevant results could argue that by juggling the results around, they defeat their own purpose. The opposite could be argued as well, especially in the case where there is no particular real difference in relevance between the top results. A static link from a busy site might make the same arguments, one way or the other. But all this leaves aside the question of how do you partically rate limit click throughs without having your own site extremely dynamic? For the likes of Google, this may not be a problem, but for a busy site with static content, having a link appear and disappear may be an unbearable load on their own server. Various other methods of rate limiting would have their own limits on success.

My take on this question is this: The site posting the link should not be required to take steps to protect the site they are linking to. However, courtessy would dictate that they do everything in their power to deal with a problem that is caused directly or indirectly by such a link. After all, knocking the site you are referring to off the web is not the best way to use that site’s information.

Now for the big one. Whose responsibility is it to protect against this type of scenario? This overlaps to some extent with the discussion of the previous questions. Extending my stated arguments forward, the clear answer is the site owner is responsible for dealing with the consequences of operating a site. That is to say, if I put up a site that becomes popular, I have to deal with the consequences of doing so. It is a risk taken by anyone who puts up a site that has anything of even remote interest. There is another dimension to this, however.

I, as an end site, do not have all the tools ncessary to handle an incoming flood of traffic. I cannot block traffic until after it has come across my bandwidth (or that of my provider). Thus, even if I take all measures available to me, I cannot slow down the inbound torrent. Fortunately, this is usually not the choke point, except on very popular sites on relatively low bandwidth connections.

What I can do as a site operator is make certain I have a version of the site that can be switched on that creates as small a bandwdith and processing footprint as possible. Then, if that doesn’t work, temporarily disabling the site might be a reasonable solution for the short term. This can deal with short term demand that dissipates.

There is little a hobby site operator can do in the face of a massive increase in demand that stays. If the operator cannot afford to continue operating the site, it must, obviously, be removed. This is unfortunate for the internet, but it is a fact of existence on the internet or, indeed, anywhere else. For example, if I cannot afford to maintain an office building, I must sell it or demolish it.

All the above said, since everyone on the internet can be the victim of the slashdot effect, everyone should do their best to mitigate such an effect. This includes linkers who should work with site owners to reduce the impact of linking. It includes internet providers and their upstreams who should cooperate in controlling traffic floods. Web hosting providers should make available the ability to rate limit web sites. And so on. But the web surfer himself has the most power to mitigate such a siutation. Web site operators could ask for mirror sites to be set up if possible, and, in particular, should not discourage mirrors of content when faced with an slashdotting.

I make the following recommendations to all web surfers. If we all followed them, we may reduce the impact of so many slashdot effects.

  • When visiting a site which is responding very slowly, go away for a period of time, preferably longer then half an hour. Continuing to stop your browser and reload the site in the hope that it responds only makes the problem worse.
  • If you know of a mirror of the site that is not responding, use it. In many cases, there are mirrors of the site which are hardly getting any traffic yet which are clearly marked in the links to the site.
  • If there are mulitple links that idenfiy themselves as mirrors, all the content should be the same. Do not always click on the first one in the list. (And site operators should, if at all possible, make the list itself rotate.)
  • Do not hammer on your reload button when the site takes longer than three seconds to display. This only slows it down and makes the load on the remote end higher.

Well, that about sums up my ramble on this topic.

Small Town Sitcom?

Yesterday, I watched the first episode of Corner Gas which is a new series on CTV in Canada. It’s basically a show about the denizens of a fictional town called Dog River in Saskatchewan.

I have to admit to being somewhat skeptical about the show but after watching the first episode I find that it has potential. It has a distinctly Canadian feel to it, at least to my mind. It also seems to get the slower pace of small town life across to the viewer. Having grown up in small towns in Alberta, much of the behaviour rang true.

Being set in a small town, it also gives the show a somewhat unique ability to point out just how stupid or ridiculous so many of the things people do are. The first episode deals with changes to the local coffee shop. I won’t spoil the details but you can imagine what sort stuff goes on.

You can check out the show’s web site at www.cornergas.com. They appear to be having technical difficulties at this time but there is no doubt they will get it sorted out soon. In fact, by time you read this, the site is probably back up.

For the terminally curious, CTV’s web site indicates that the show is filmed on location in Rouleau, Saskatchewan and at a studio in Regina.

A productive day

A few months ago, I decided to move to a new place to save myself some money on rent. Then I learned that my sister wanted to move to Calgary. We then hatched a cunning scheme to do the room mate thing. This saves me on rent and it makes it affordable for her to move.

To this end, we began a search for a place for April 1. On Thursday, a promising listing jumped out at me and I responded to it. Today, we viewed the place. My sister was sold within five minutes and, I have to admit that I liked the place right off too. So we did the necessary paper work and put down a deposit.

So now we have over two months to make the necessary arrangments for the details (like how to actually move my sister’s stuff from Camrose to Calgary). But the worst part of the process is sorted out.

Popular Culture and Hackers

As astounding as this might be, I finally got around to watching the movie Hackers tonight. One would have thought that I would have watched it a long time since given where my interests lie. Yet all these years have passed since the movie was released and I only watched it today.

The roots of this probably lie in the usual portrayal of hackers and technology in general in the movies. For example, in The Net, just about everything was completely wrong. Television shows seem to suffer from the same problem. In fact, popular culture as a whole seems to ascribe mythical powers to a group of people collectively labelled "hackers". Perhaps this was the reason I avoided watching the movie.

It turns out that Hackers gets a lot more things right than I would have expected. While the computer sequences are somewhat hokey and the hackers are made out to be somewhat larger than life, overall, it gives the best picture of hacking I’ve seen in the movies. It was refreshing to see them struggle with breaking in, using social engineering, dumpster diving, and so on. And, in the interest of not boring the audience I can accept the accelerated timing of many of the exploits.

All in all, I have to say that the movie is remarkably good for a mainstream type of film. Not to mention it was entertaining. And, I suppose, the "scenery" was not hard to look at.

As a side note,I am staying completely out of the argument over the definition of hacker vs. cracker and so on since I think it’s completely childish. Thus I reserve the right to publish any flames about terminology with scathing comments. I mean, complaining that people who would ordinarily qualify for the title of hacker should be called cracker because they do something evil is like saying that the term person should not apply to someone who is evil. I now climb off my soap box.

As Luck Would Have It

As luck would have it, when I finally win something, I end up with an emergency at the office. That’s the way things shaped up for me today.

I got a telephone call on Monday (yesterday) that I had won something and that I would need to collect it Tuesday (today) in the evening. This was apparently a condition of winning. I figured it wouldn’t be too onerous to actually show up and win something. But, as luck would have it, this morning I found out we had a bit of an emergency at the office which required me to stay later today. This, of course, confliced with the time of the prize collection.

Truthfully, I’m not all that broken up about it since the prize was not something I was likely going to do anything about. But, this illustrates my luck when it comes to winning things. All in all, I suppose a bit of unluck with winning things compared to having a relatively smooth life is a fair trade.

Of course, if I won a bunch of cash, I wouldn’t complain.

Another Year Turns

The year 2003 is just about finished in my locale as I write this. It has been an eventful year yet 2004 looks to be just as eventful. Perhaps this is a sign of the times – these do be interesting times.

In 2003, we saw the completion of the Matrix trilogy, the theatrical release of the final chapter of The Lord of the Rings, the release of the 2.6.0 version of the Linux kernel, and numerous other things. What 2004 holds is not clear but no doubt it will be just as exciting.

I did have myself a good New Year’s Eve, however. I went to Paycheck and Peter Pan. Both movies were entertaining. Paycheck was a sci-fi action film and fairly well done. Peter Pan is yet another production of the classic tale and a very good one at that.

Well, here’s to the turning of the year!

The Great Apartment Cleanup II

About a month ago, I wrote about my grand project to clean up my apartment. Since then, some progress has been had.

A month ago, I had a stack of computer gear to get rid of. I have since removed that stack. I also disassembled a rather large shelf system and got rid of it. Of course, that made the piles of junk even worse since I had to empty the shelves before disassembling them.

Today, I finally got around to doing something about a lot of the mess. I packed a rather large collection of odds and ends and stuff into boxes and stacked those neatly up in an out of the way place. I also have a rather large stack of trash bags (full ones) that need to be removed to the dumpster but that’s going to wait until tomorrow.

Now, the current state of the apartment is that I have tidied up the bedroom and the living room. I have the kitchen and the bathroom to go. I now feel like I actually have finally gotten a good start on the project. Although, in all honesty, I have to say that I’m at best half finished the project.

It is absolutely astounding how much bigger a space looks when you remove all the junk.