Online Dating Paranoia, Part II

One of the nice things about having your own website is that you can MEASURE paranoia and suspicion.

For instance, I almost always get a Washington-based hit on my website just preceding the rejection email from a prospective woman.

It tells me a lot about how much paranoia I'm dealing with.

It's a purposeful strategy.
Yup, that's me you see fighting fire with fire!
Online datamining paranoia to fight online dating paranoia!

Nucleus Of A Methodology

I watched a Service-Oriented Architecture project fail first-hand. Technically it's not failed yet, but it seems likely now. I don't have the background to know the true cause, but I posted the quagmire of SOA in January of this year -

"IBM carefully crafted a system design which attempts to span the range of all things to all people. This could be a possible failure point of SOA."

I believe that SOA's greatest weakness is at the operational level. The strategic level of SOA is well-defined with training, documents and templates. My experience at coding and low-level implmentation is that tactical level is sound, too.

What's left is the operational level - a methodology and structure to convert strategic goals into tactical constructs. So let's draw up the nucleus of an operational structure for SOA -

What do we know that's concrete?

1) There's a high-level SOA structure which should take priority over tactical requirements.

2) At any point in time, there's an optimum project complexity that's achievable by the latest toolset and a certain team size. As team size grows, risk of failure rises. As complexity grows, either the toolset or team size (or both) must increase to compensate.

3) The greatest component of complexity is class differentation.

4) Existing frameworks can reduce complexity if the project is defined in a standardized form.

to be continued...

Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD Meme - The Verdict

The previous graphs from Dec 2006 for Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD.

The updated graphs show a significant gradient change for Blu-Ray.
My tentative guess is that Blu-ray will be the dominant standard within a year.

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"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction, both are transformed." —Carl Gustav Jung

Skydiving

So I'm signed up for skydiving on the 18th.
Hopefully it's not already booked up.

Today's IM

Me: these women are totally paranoid.
Me: They're doing background checks, verifying marriages.
Me: Holy cow. I had one that verified that I have "an alt.com" account so we're not compatible.
Me: I'm a PLAYER!
Me: ME!
Me: I. am. a. player.
Me: is that nuts? Or is me? AM I a player?

JJ: Yow!

Me: it's unreal.

JJ: Yes, it's nuts. It's full-bore Zippy the Pinhead unreality levels. Steve Jobs would be jealous.

Me: I'm totally blown away. I may just cancel the account then.
Me: There's no point, I'm divorced yet and I'll get called a liar no matter what.
Me: I'm not divorced yet.

JJ: Do you still get alt.com nibbles?

Me: once in awhile. I don't work it.
Me: I'm going to Ohio, btw.

JJ: Yes, you mentioned it was possible. Anywhere pleasant in Ohio?

Me: I don't know. I get the official orders on Monday, but it's going to happen now.
Me: I knew the country was secretly paranoid.
Me: Now I got it confirmed.

JJ: Paranoid? Why? Because we're about to allow ISPs to record all of our activity, let telcos get away with helping install Naurus boxes, and let agencies to social network analysis that could be easily abused? They're not paranoid enough.

Me: that's on the other end. Nobody trusts anybody else in the whole country. It's amazing to watch.
Me: It's prime for disruption

JJ: I think they realize that -- but don't connect the increased surveillance with upping the paranoia level and potential disruptive effects. They already announce that one should "watch what you say".

Me: what's interesting is the countereffect.
Me: Just as companies now hire people who game the rules instead of good employees, people will come to trust people who game the system instead of honest people.
Me: I just got a ton of hits out of LA. I havent' had action like that since I got swarmed by Yahoo and Google. I wonder what's up.

JJ: I don't think they'll trust them -- they'll acquire more of them.
JJ: "Trust" is only an important metric if the manager's aren't gaming the system too.

Me: Ahh, well, that's the oligopy pattern, the centralized information hiding pattern.
Me: oligopoly.
Me: What it means that is that things devolve back to peer-to-peer.

Three Phone Calls

She called me three times while I was in Portland. I don't know how she got my number. For awhile I assumed that she pulled it off Monster.com somehow. But later I thought perhaps it was through a real estate connection... the loan company or perhaps the title company.

Back then I never checked incoming numbers, I'd just answer "Hello, this is Broward". Twice there was a long silence and I could hear her breath. Once, she said, "Hello" and stopped. There was dead silence for fifteen or twenty seconds and one of us finally hung up, I don't remember who.

I am a relentless son-of-a-bitch, aren't I?

The Lena Tweak was a two-fold mission. I did want to test out that level of guilt-driven fear, but I also wanted to test the community itself, to see how fast it would fold up on its "principles". Around December, an ex-community member said to me,

"They're just Mormons dressed in black"

Now, that phrases was clearly designed to tweak me, but I learned a lot from the Idaho "Do The Right Thing" Mormons, namely that "do the right thing" applies pretty much to other Mormons and not necessarily to anyone else.

And I don't like committing time and resources now without a serious acid test.
So I pushed a little and the "principles" folded up pretty damn easily.

Paranoid Woman

"You're still here?!
It's over!
Go home!" - Ferris Bueller

Online Dating Paranoia

Wow. I had no idea... well, that's not true. I did have an idea of the underlying paranoia that grips the country. It's so well hidden behind polite smiles and bland gazes that I tend to discount it. But I am amazed at the level of paranoia in the on-line dating sites. When even I have turned into "a player" because my divorce isn't finalized, the country has gone off the deep end.

I mean, damn.
At least let me "play" a few women before I get convicted!

Okay, I did play Lena, but not for sex and she was already convinced that I was a Supernatural Spirit of Revenge before I met her, so I don't see how that one can count!

"I am the Ghost of Poison Temple Past!"

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I met three women last night and the first two were easy introductions and conversations. Another confirmation that my seventeen-year-old engrams are misleading, I'm not the same person I was then. But it's partly age, too. All the easy conversations were with women in their forties.

The strained conversations (and strange happenings) were with the younger ones.
They may not be worth the annoyance.

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So I'm off to Ohio, I guess, probably for several weeks.
I'll fly back to Seattle for the June 10th weekend, but I'll probably just stay in Ohio otherwise.

I have an advance copy of The Parlor's new happy hour menu.
It's gonna have an impact on Rock Bottom, that's for sure.

So I'm a player.
That's fricking hilarious.
I WISH!

I'm trying to be, but come on...
I can still hardly stutter a greeting to a beautiful woman!

I am looking forward to the Shark Cage tonight, though.
I saw several women in my age group last weekend.

My Lovely Disease Vector

You know what the 10 Commandants are? They're a disease-control mechanism. I see it better now that I've seen how easy it is to disrupt the LJ community. Over the long-run, the only way to win is by playing percentage shots. In terms of biodiversity and cultural differentation, the percentage shot is to stay in the two-sigma band of the normal distribution curve. Data points in the fringe areas, the three-sigma+ points, are more susceptible to disruptive memes and disease.

I'm fairly sure that the cultural differentation is occurring. A vector that can infect most of the population means that the population lacks diversity. So the population differentiates to reduce the total impact of any particular disease vector. That's probably where we're headed, towards a continuous differentation until it's almost impossible to force a meme through anything larger than a small, specialized community.

This should be measurable. The power law distributions of the large websites should be flattening out. A trend towards more localized content would also be a confirmation signal.

The downside, culturally, is this creates a cultural quagmire. A common cultural context lets vectors spread quick and far, but it's also the mechanism behind widespread, altruistic trends and accomplishments. I'm not sure the U.S. could duplicate the reaction and response to a Pearl Harbor event anymore. The Iraqi War doesn't have the same scale, support or commitment. It's a smokescreen, a bluff.

Perhaps that's not a bad thing, except that the homogeneous cultures, like China and the other Asian countries, retain that capability. It could be a competitive advantage in certain environments.

The original government design of the U.S. concentrated resources at the local level, some resources at the State level and the least resources at the global or Federal level. Over the past fifty years, that triangle has been inverted. The bulk of resources are manipulated at the global level. In terms of diversity, that's a bad thing. A trend towards cultural differentation would focus attention on the local level and ignore the global.

So there's a possible conflict, a cultural dichotomy, a cognitive dissonance. People are tending inwards, towards smaller communities and local focus, but we've got a monolith that's been moving in the opposite direction for fifty years.

It could turn into an issue.
I wish I could get a clear measure of the trend.

The Fear Amplifier

Okay. I'll come clean. Once I realized that Lena had slandered me and that she was so prone to fear and paranoia, I decided to use her as an active device, a human transistor in a meme disruption experiment.

A community fear amplifier if you will.

I purposely tweaked her hot, then cold by letting her own fears run wild, to see how much paranoia and fear she would transmit into the community-at-large. I tried to create sympathetic emotional vibrations that built upon each other, raising the crest with each new wave, but I couldn't get the timing right. However, she was a damn good amplifier with just a single tweak. If you located four Lenas and tweaked them with an offset sequencing, you might potentially generate, oh say, eight times the pandemonium that a single Lena could create.

She acted as a fear mutator, too, I think. That is, she filtered the initial ambivalent message through her fears, then transmuted that into a personalized form for each person that she communicated with. That's far more powerful than my guesses at each person's possible fear permutations. I wish I could quantify it, which is why I focus mostly on Internet memes. They have a quantifiable quality that's hard to duplicate in real life.

As for the Fenix, I can't be sure what brought it down. I did do another meme experiment several months ago and it's possible that it took root and grew. But once again, it's hard to prove just what really happened in a real life situation.

This new disruption material might be good for Defcon in 2007. What can I say? I'm just a big bag of surprises, even Yahoo Personals says so!

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On a positive note, I laid out two more seduction setups. They're both low percentage, but the two women tonight are the most interesting that I've seen in months. C'est la vie!

I've been using the Seduction Insider for over three weeks now. It works. I was sceptical at first, but I can't deny the recent results.

The Cultural Anti-Diffusion

Trends tend to be evolutionary. They are the result of forces and counter-forces which slowly shift over time. If the cultural diffusion theory is correct, the information revolution is a primary force. But what about counter-balancing forces?

Commerce is a counter-balancing force at the macro level. Economic transactions are more efficient with a common language, common currency and common legal system. This is why the Euro exists, why English is used worldwide, and why the dollar still reigns in global trade.

Assume that the cultural diffusion is an evolutionary process creating many differentiated communities from core communities. But it's a process of trial and error and most mutations fail because they lack that rare superiority to build and hold their own evolutionary niche.

Communities created through a process of trial-and-error lack a consistent philosophical base. My current experiment has an aggregation of many different philosophical bases. I wish I could quantify my conclusion. I've learned to distrust any single viewpoint in the community, each tends to be highly biased by personal beliefs and community standing, more than I've seen before. Is it a function of a lack of cohesive philosophical base? I think so but I can't prove it.

The Saleslogix disruption was a function of three factors -

1) Common context bound by stock options and a central point of communication.
2) A clear instance of operational mismanagement which fractured a solid team.
3) Strategic management had veered into deception several months before, eroding credibility

#1 set the transport, the conduit of attack.
#2 defined the object of attack, the damaged team.
#3 defined the method of attack, fading credibility can often be devasted by ridicule.

Centralized communication was a weak point at Saleslogix. In contrast to that, the current experiment suffers from distributed, disjointed communication with heavy personal bias. Think of the movie Needful Things and you can imagine the strategy and potential for disruption; a set of Mixed Messages that splinter factions and sow distrust and miscommunication.

I've had the notion of counter-balancing forces to the "cultural diffusion" for awhile but I hadn't pinned down concrete examples. I just knew that they had to exist because they exist for the biological counterparts in nature. The centralized disruption is simple and cost-effective, but requires unique events. The decentralized disruption is harder, it requires specialized, initimate knowledge to build mixed message patterns but it should be executable at will.

For future cryptic reference, the centralized attack could be labelled as the "Chinese disruption strategy" while the decentralized attack could be labelled the "United States disruption strategy".

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A gratifying number of logins from financial and investment institutions over the past few days. Somebody somewhere is actually taking the "social software" predictions seriously. Well, heck, man, it is classic MBA textbook material.

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Sigh.
Another anonymouse login right at 8:00 am, a percentage bet predicated on past punctual performance.
Why do you bother?

Women In General

My last period of serious dating was 1989. That's seventeen years ago. I've realized that my remembered experiences, the fossils of that period, still exist in my mind but they're no longer relevant to who I am. They shape my expectations, but they're not predictive anymore.

Friday's sex romp, for instance, was so easy. It wasn't the awkward, tense or unsure sex that I remember from my pre-marriage days. I still don't understand it, really. It was almost choreographed, it flowed more naturally than most of the encounters with my ex-wife.

Tonight I met two women, Stacy and then Sasha. I shook their hands, introduced myself and talked about the local topic of the moment. It was so easy. Why did I think it was hard? Of course, it helped that I was in an environment of normal, unfreaked-out people. But I didn't have any fear tonight, I don't know where it went. Sasha, a bleached blonde, mid-twenties, friendlier and more perceptive than she should have been.

This could turn into some fun.

A Sign Of Weakness

In the early 1990s, I worked three part-time jobs - lab assistant for BSU, the ASPEN Federal grant (for Federal Law Enforcement, wink wink!) and weekend shifts at Hewlett-Packard. My HP email account often had personal email and corporate policy was clear in permitting such use. During an audit, an HP manager accessed my account and was disturbed by my true thoughts about HP management. He charged me with misuse of company email, mostly because he was angry, but he was also clueless about official policy.

Now, the policy was clear but the subsequent legalities that flowed from that policy were unclear.

If one is liable for an action, then issuing a policy post-haste won't change that liability.
If one is not liable for an action, then issuing a policy post-haste makes no difference.

And sometimes a new policy can add more liability for no immediate benefit. How might it add more liability? When that new policy is a transparent attempt to justify a rash action.

In either case, the issuance of a new policy post-haste is a sign of weakness and sometimes a sign of panic.

In the HP case, I didn't care much what happened because I was shifting to full-time work on the ASPEN grant. Upper management, however, was quite worried and very nice to me. It's always good to be in a situation where... you really don't care about the outcome and you can just experiment with different ideas to see what happens.

Wow. Speaking of the ASPEN project, I was here in Seattle working with the Washington State Patrol in 1995. Yeah, here it is!...

"ASPEN interface - to provide real-time access to safety inspection information"

Man, I haven't talked to those guys in years!

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Since we still get these Temple girl logins, I can't resist another update -

Last night I managed to introduce myself to an hispanic woman, Lydia, in her early thirties. She had... an attitude.. that was hard to resist. We made eye contact several times, and then she pulled her girlfriend over within range of my voice and we started talking. She might be at the club again tonight. Definitely a "take-charge" woman, she had me weak-kneeed in minutes. Yeah!

Dreams of Screams

I drove back across the bridge while she stroked my right leg, her hand slowly moving inward. My breath was ragged but I focused on driving. As her hand made touchdown, I drew a deep breath and exhaled.

"Look. Are we going back to your car or back to my apartment?"

"We're going to get my car and then go back to your apartment."

Over the next 2 1/2 hours, I coaxed over fifteen low gutteral screams out of her, a new experience for me. The police never showed so the soundproofing must be fairly good. Then I had three consecutive payoffs, each immediately after the next because... well, because she wouldn't STOP, only pausing long enough for the nerves to re-numb themselves in anticipation of another assault.

It was surprisingly smooth and easy, much different than my memories of pre-marriage encounters including my ex-wife.

Spurs & Fishnets

{suggestive entry removed}

Sorry, readers.

For once... I have some incentive to keep my mouth shut.
If I keep it open, I might get a saddle bit jammed in it.