There was a recent thread in the tcphp mailing list discussing supporting local businesses. I have become increasingly interested in this topic because it hits so close to home. I work hard to support the local development community but it turns out that the same people interested in using free, local resources are the ones who value saving a buck over supporting local businesses. If I wasn't so pigheaded about pursuing my vision in light of the disappointment and mounting debt, this attitude would put me out of business and one more local resource would vanish. When people who participate in this cheap-at-any-cost culture complain that their jobs are getting shipped overseas I have to question their critical thinking skills.

Today, I questioned my own critical thinking skills. I was out and about, and found myself very hungry, craving noodles in salad with a good savory sauce. My first instinct was to get in the car and drive to Noodles and Company and order up some Indonesian noodles.

The thing is, I was making this decision at 25th and Nicollet: arguably the best spot in town for really good, authentic Asian noodles. Duh!

So I went on a quest. I had my heart set on some Veitnamese Bun noodles. It actually took four restaurants to find them, and I felt like a jerk walking out of all those places - some were too pricy, and one only served soup. I finally found a place called Pho 79, described what I wanted like the big white dork that I am, and was served the best Bun Mock Duck I've had in a very long time. Much better than my favorite neo-fast-food noodle restaurant, and $2 less to boot!

Shame on me for not thinking local right off the bat.

I am always astonished when a stranger's child catches my shoots me a dazzling, genuine smile. The kind that seems to stem from true happiness and interest in the world around them. A kind of freedom.

Over time, this joie de vivre seems to dissipate. Sure, we adults enjoy stuff, but we're not going to let some stranger know about it. That genuine smile evolves into a kind of strange, obligatory grimace. It happens all the time: you realize that you have inadvertently caught the eye of a stranger and you turn the corners of your mouth up in a cheap, fake smile. This process is so automatic that you freeze this expression and only remember to change it a few seconds after looking away. Is trading in your outgoing interest in life for bizzare social mores a necessary part of becoming an adult? No wonder "unadulterated" is such a positive term.

This morning I was skating down the Greenway and a woman heading the opposite direction shot me one of those big kid smiles. Thinking about this, I realized that this acutally happens a lot on city paths. You're working out, jammin' to good tunes and you spot someone having a similarly good time. For half a second, you connect with that stranger and share a look that says, "isn't it great to be out here on such a nice day?" Maybe becoming an adult means getting a little more selective with genuine smiles.

The whole experience must have put me in a good mood. When I got back into the building I held the door for someone who seemed pleasantly surprised and genuinely grateful. Later, someone stopped me on the street and observed how buoyant and joyful I was and how nice it was to see that. It was mainly a pickup line, but I'll take it! I suggested that perhaps I brightened his day just a little and he could spread the joy to someone else.

Says a lot for having access to a good park and trail system. Thanks, trail lady!

I once worked at a place where the standing policy was that I couldn't bring a problem to my manager without thinking of at least one possible solution. I couldn't say, "There are eight pallets of stock, nowhere to put it and my guys are all out sick!" Instead, I had to say, "There are eight pallets of stock. I think I can fit them in overstock but I'll have to do some rearranging. Is it possible to borrow someone from a different department to help me out?"

This got annoying when I just wanted to vent, but it turned out to be very empowering and has changed my behavior to this day. Complaining or introducing problems to people creates chaos. Identifying positive solutions alleviates chaos and sets a path towards eliminating it. At that job, thinking about all the things I couldn't do made me want to throw in the towel and go home, but when the option to feel sorry for myself was gone I felt energized because I was thinking about all the things I could do. And even if my manager thought my idea sucked, at least we had a starting point.

We don't have enough starting points, and there are too many people creating chaos. It is an epidemic. People call me to complain about problems when they have no intention of telling me how I can fix them. Citizens who are concerned about our country and our politics react by saying, "Democracy is bunk", not by empowering themselves to learn how to leverage democracy to make a positive change. Every day, I see more complaints and protests and I hear angry voices lamenting how bad things are, but never praising how good the alternatives might be.

It is my belief that all of this festering grouchiness and peoples' unwillingness to offer solutions are building all this chaos around us. And the chaos begets sheer apathy peppered with irrational outbursts.

When problems of violence and politics and pollution and everything bad in the world begin to overwhelm us and there's no possible starting point for solutions, it is just too much to take. If there's nothing we can do about it, why not just drown out the chaos by sedating yourself with a nice brew and kicking back to enjoy the latest round of "reality" programming?

But when the unmitigated chaos causes some kid to bring a gun to school and shoot his classmates we look into his troubled lives and say "poor kid. it must have been rough". We
enable him to feel sorry for himself by agreeing that his problems were
valid and not suggesting from day 1 that there were more appropriate solutions.

I don't know what to do, except try to live by the philosophy of discussing problems only in conjunction with possible solutions. There's enough in the world to make me feel helpless but I rarely, if ever, am helpless.

So I just got a new request for hosting from someone who probably intends to use my servers for evil. The IP, 202.169.239.68, is from somewhere in asia and the email address, juragan@taxi.lu is from some kind of email service in Luxembourg. All of the other contact details, including credit card info, are for some poor soul in Florida. I'll have to contact her to see what's what.

I was so pleased to get an order through Google. We're so pathetically ranked it is a shock to get a hit for "php hosting" (we're #62 for that). I wish I could say that my SEO savvy magically paid off, but getting business from Google was actually my first clue to the trouble.

I'm glad I caught it - I would be heartbroken to find have my servers used for something unsavory. I'm annoyed at having to follow up with all of this and it is upsetting to feel helpless. I can turn them away, but what's to stop them from going through php host #63?

So counterproductive!

Web hosting prices have ventured into "Girls Gone Wild" territory. Apparently not confident about what they truly have to offer the world, web hosts are taking it all off and giving away an increasingly unnessesary amount of resources for low-low prices. You can only give away so much unlimited bandwidth space at $2 month before your business model becomes unscalable, who will make it in the long run?