Reading is Totally Overrated

On a lot of occasions I’ve heard someone say “Yeah I really need to read more.” My response to this has never been much more than “ah okay” but that has now changed to “No you don’t.”

Regardless of the hundreds of scientific studies that most likely will say “WHAT?!” to this, reading a book does not make you smarter. Reading, as does many other things, stimulates the mind. If a person reads a lot well then they likely get better at reading. I guess by this argument you could say, “Well hah, reading does make you smarter shut up already”, but I’d say that doing anything over a prolonged period of time causes you to generally get better at that activity. Extensively playing a video game will make you better at that video game. Coupled with an increased chance of obesity it will probably also help you adapt faster to newer video games because you are subconsciously mastering the art of using the controller. Why should learning how to play video games better be looked upon in any lesser light than say… learning how to consume text faster so you can read the latest Harry Potter book quicker?

Just like anything it’s how we apply it. If you’re reading a plethora of fun fiction books to increase your reading ability to some day delve into the world of nonfiction in the hopes of learning great things, you could be on to something. But it seems as though many people feel that if they read three or four books a year they’re really contributing to their brain in some dramatic “I need to do this more often” way. If the feeling alone that you’re getting smarter because you’re reading is adequate enough then maybe you should just do it. I know a lot of people who think they’re brilliant though and it’s just not true.

Most people are probably wasting their time with books. Watch the movie version because you’re probably a slow reader anyway. Take the time you saved and go do something that will engage you differently. Everyone learns in a variety of ways and for many that self improvement does not come from reading a book. I’ll blame that one on the school system for having such a shitty way of immersing us in the world of books in the first place.

I love to read now. I like fiction, nonfiction, news articles which are really a toss up for what category they fall under… Just about anything other than dumb blog posts on the internet are worth my time to read. I consider myself lucky though that I was able to get to the point where I enjoy books. The problem I faced through school was it was their primary job that I learned to read, second job, understand that books are boring.

Growing up we were always assigned these mostly dry incredibly dull books. Okay, maybe they were just dull for me. The Teachers would tout them as incredible or great, something we really should experience. Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, whatever. Give me a break. I’m a young teen, I don’t want some deep thought provoking book I need stimulation. If this is what a great book is then I don’t want part of it. You want kids to grasp that books can relate to them or be more exciting? Have them read Twilight for required reading. The overreaching goal here should not be to have kids learn classics and understand quality literature but to have them learn that books can be good. As kids we are some what impressionable and being told “This is a good book” and then not liking it, to me meant “Well it probably is a good book, but I just don’t like to read because books are boring.”

Once a taste for reading is developed you can move on to less interesting, more thought provoking, literature without inducing extreme hatred for the activity.

Folks that have been sticking their faces in books since breast feeding and have never stopped since often to me have this elitist attitude that the stuff we read in those days was good, you just didn’t understand them. Not true, those people are just boring and can appreciate a dry book more than others. Anyone that believes that most teenagers should appreciate classic literature, or classic anything for that matter is a ignorant and probably quite a douche. Yes this is brilliant, take a culture that is trying to figure out its own identity and force them to do things their parents like. What a super idea it’s strange more people don’t like reading.

Enough digression into why we don’t read; none of that matters though because, again, reading does not make you smarter. Or how about this, the act of reading does not make you smarter than some other activity if that’s not how your mind has been conditioned to learn. If you’re not already an avid reader and your desire to become one revolves around the idea that you will some how become more worldly just forget it. Take a college class, watch the history channel, find some other outlet to enhance your skills. We learn a lot more from doing than we do from anything we’ll read anyway.

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Resteraunt

If I were the U.S. Government (or a lot of other governments for that matter) I can’t think of one company I’d rather have fall into financial downturn and be deemed “too big” to fail more than Google. Sure due to their infrastructure would cost billions in tax payer dollars to maintain but man, wouldn’t the data retrieved be worth it if you really wanted to spy on someone? There is no person alive and probably will never be that knows or has stored more information about me than Goooooooooogle >

I was tallying up the list of Google Services utilized by me and it’s scary:

Android, Blogger, Book Search, Browser Sync, Calendar, Checkout, Chrome, Code, Contacts, Docs, Froogle, Goggles, Groups, Images, Latitude, Listen, Mail, Maps, News, Notebook, Picasa, Profile, Reader, Talk, Voice, Web Search, Wave, YouTube… and I’ll probably start using Buzz once it works correctly. Can’t wait to make a Buzz about some annoying girl at the bar only to have her see it on Google maps when she checks her phone.

Google knows my bank account number and two of the credit cards I use. They know where I live and thanks to latitude they have a good idea of where I spend a majority of my time. They know where I work and what I do, they know who leaves me voice mails and what they’re saying to me. I don’t get calls through Google Voice so at least that’s one aspect of my life they’re not completely in the know on.

But those are obvious things, what about the little things Google knows? They probably know I can’t spell restaurant. The amount of times I’ve incorrectly typed it in there just to find the real spelling is staggering (205 times to be exact, thanks Google Search History). I spell the word so bad not even a built in spell check from any program knows what I’m talking about, but Google does. Yes! Thank you, I did mean “Restaurant” <3.  Likely they’re aware I’m an egomaniac by the amount of times I’ve searched my own name both in web search and images followed by the obscene amount of times I’ve actually clicked the link for pages about me. I wonder if they know I get pissed because I’m not the first result for “Ben Eubank“. Thanks to Google’s new Navigation they also know I’m a chronic speeder on the road and should probably start marketing me Radar detectors in my search results.

Oh wait, hypothetical product #1230912 Google Profiler. This is where a government agency enters in all the information they have related to a crime and Google spits back a list of suspects based on everything it knows on them and why they’re relevant. Let’s say I’m a really dumb criminal. I have an Android phone with Google Latitude installed. I break into a random person’s house and brutally murder their whole family. Later I decide to search Google for “Good ways to dispose of dead tissue and bones.” Two days later when the bodies are discovered Detective Lennie Briscoe types in the address of the crime and a few other details and finds out Ben Eubank was prowlin’ that area and wants to learn how to dispose of people.

Actually that’s a really sweet idea maybe they’ll invent it some day. Unlike most people I am not paranoid about the government, or some other mega-entity, knowing just about everything there is to know about me; I’m also not a criminal. Not that only criminals like a private life, I’m sure millions of law abiding citizens do too, but Google understands me and makes my web experience much more pleasurable. There’s no way it could do this without me telling it all my secrets.

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I Like to Type

At first my thinking was “I Like  to Write” but that’s not entirely true. More than anything I just like typing fast. It has a rhythmic relaxing sensation. If you can’t type fast you wouldn’t understand. The best is when the sentences and words flow from left to right down the keyboard, that’s my favorite. Writing by hand is horrible. For starters my handwriting is atrocious. I have absolutely no consistency for when I use capital letters or not. a LOt of MY SENtencES wIll lOOK liKe THIS, except harder to read. On top of it being bad, I’m slow. In the time I takes me to write two sentences most people have finished a paragraph.

Once I thought it would be important to up my game in the penmanship field but as technology progresses I’ve decided to hone my skills elsewhere. At this point it almost feels like my hobby of drinking beer really fast has about as much use as nice handwriting. Pretty soon we’ll all be typing on the poorly named iPad for everything anyway right?

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Last night I was roaming around the internet looking for a new book to read. I’ve been busting through a few lately and wanted something that might take me a bit longer. So I found Infinite Jest and downloaded from the Sony eReader store, or whatever they’re calling it these days, only to find it was corrupted.

Downloading a messed up book is likely the best thing that has ever happened to me in the digital book world. Determined to read the damn thing I scoured the internet for a solution to my problem. I came across someone else who also bought my book in ePub format from Sony back in December and said something along the lines of “They said they would email me back when it was fixed but they never did so I just converted it and now it works.”

The process to convert a book sounded confusing because it was late at night and I just wanted to read. I tried about 300 (5) different ways to get the file on my reader without success and avoiding this conversion process. Then I contacted Sony via 24/7 Live Chat where I was connected to “Timothi” who was very wise and said “I recommend you try downloading the book again.”

Annoyed I decided to break down and do this conversion thing… download python… save these scripts, run file, insert keys… what… thefuck am I doing? I claim to be a developer by day but even this is a bit confusing yet some how some book geek on a message board and three hundred thank you comments lead me to believe it must be easy. It actually is too, as long as I don’t try to figure out anything myself and do exactly as the instructions say I’m golden and the book has been converted.

What does converted mean? It means I was able to strip off the Adobe DRM and convert the book to any eReader format I want. Now my books 33 purchased digital books can be used on any device. Hurray for freedom. Unfortunately I still think Sony makes the best readers at this point in time even if their store is crap, their support is outsourced and their software was developed by high school students for an intro to programming project.

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Free Stuff

Pretty sure I’ve never heard someone say “Let me give you a little bit of free advice” followed by something that didn’t irritate me. A lot of folks like free things. I saw the “NO WE WILL NOT PAY $3.99 A MONTH TO USE FACEBOOK” group (which by the way was just a rumor) with over one million people in it, so there’s gotta be at least one million that like Facebook to be free. It could be argued that certain free sites, a majority of them, are not free, they’re ad supported. I suppose this is true, if I clicked on those ads.

When advertising becomes overlooked noise or just blocked and ignored forever it generates sites no money. Whoa, did I just blow your mind? I didn’t think so. Why is it expected that everything on the internet be free? What happens if Facebook did start charging because they needed money… you wouldn’t pay? You wouldn’t pay for a service that kept you in touch with your friends, stored photos, videos, helped you network and sell things? Would you go to MySpace? How come you didn’t have an account there previously? oh yeah because it’s horrible. Sorry for a bunch of questions I don’t expect anyone to answer but I really see no reason outside of ad revenue why such a site should be free. If something is enjoyed you should be excited they start charging a very nominal fee so they can improve it and you can enjoy it more.

Where it kills me the most is news. Free news sucks. It’s horrible and the internet is just a giant grounds for plagiarism of crappy article after crappy article. Recently with my Owl City fiasco (still waiting on my check Universal Republic what’s taking so long?) I was emailed by one site who decided to make a post about Owl City using my work because they “are not fans.” After that there was a few days I spent showing people the article about myself on the internet because I like attention. Having never saved the link I would simply type “Ben Eubank Owl City” into google and BAM first result. Then after two or three days I started to notice there was more than one result, there was more than one article. It would all be rather exciting if the entire internet was getting up in arms and going to my defense but they weren’t. They were simply ripping off the original author either completely or mostly and adding a little of their own twist to the text.  So desperate to find anything to post to their site and too lazy to actually write it themselves.

I want big media to stick around. I’m positive I don’t want to read poorly written articles/blogs by someone who lived by a major event or  analysis of what some unintelligent know-it-all thought about the president’s latest stance on an issue. Of course the main news providers have flaws, namely producing extreme biased reporting at times, but at least they’re usually well written and fact checked. What I mean is you don’t go to CNN and pick out four spelling mistakes and a ton of poor grammar. You’re not questioning whether the Fox News Reporter actually interviewed the person they’ve claimed to. While it might seem a little biased it doesn’t read like a fourteen year old high school student writing a paper trying to prove his/her point. I hope CNN stops giving away news for free and the other big guys follow suit. Sure, some douche bag will ultimately retell everything they’ve read there but like all most other free news it will either suck or be illegally plagiarized from the original author.

Free information gets pretty nasty in the way of product reviews. I don’t really have an answer to how to solve this problem, or any other issue I seem to mostly rant about, but this one gets me the worst. Free reviews on products have so many bad things going for them. They get used by other people as their own review, they’re usually heavily biased towards the product in one way or another, often have never used the product they’re comparing it to or the product itself, full of bad information, and my favorite is bad reviews that get their information from other shitty misinformed rumors/reviews. It kills me when I’m out trying to find information for a piece of software or a new book only to realize half way through some lengthy review that the person probably has never used the product. Maybe a disclaimer on all reviews will help “I have never used this product but I still feel the need to review it for you with no more knowledge than you have.” Amazon must have found this annoying too as they attempt to make things better putting a “Amazon Verified Purchase” next to names of reviewers who they can say bought the product they’re reviewing. Of course that only solves the “I’m reviewing something I’ve never used” problem and not the plethora of others. It would be awesome if “Well just don’t read the reviews if they suck” was a good alternative. Unfortunately in order to know something sucks you generally have to read it to find out.

The US cell phone industry reminds me a lot of free information. Cell providers in America give away free phones, or considerable discounts on them. Due to this subsidy on phones they require people to have contracts, have higher rates than other parts of the world and annoy people. People expect the discounted phone, if you don’t give it to them… they’ll get it somewhere else. If one cell company said “No contract required but you provide the phone” then you go looking for unlocked phone prices only to find they’re $300-$600 you would say “f-u cell company X I’ll just use Y because they have a free phone! BOOYAH BITCHES” then you’d probably complain in about a year and a half how you’re in contract and can’t “upgrade” yet etc, etc, etc. It’s possible you’re not seeing the parallel here I see with free stuff on the net. But it’s like this… if CNN starts charging, you’ll like go read another news site, and another, and another because for whatever reason you don’t feel it’s justified for a site to charge for news. Facebook charges? go to myspace. Everything could be better but we’ve found ourselves in a situation where unless every company worthwhile over night decided to change it would be an incredibly ballsy (and highly unprofitable) thing for anyone to start charging. If AT&T started saying the only way you could get an iPhone was to pay $500 but you wouldn’t need a contract there would be a lot less iPhones and probably a lot less subscribers as they went over to Verizon who saw that as a great opportunity to save money up front.

Not everyone should charge, small media that is worthless should continue to be free or ad driven (by the way I think news and print media sites should charge and have ads). When they are big enough boys to have real journalism/good products and people deem it worthy then charge. What’s the point when you start charging? I don’t know, I guess when you can.

In my perfect world where the internet stops being completely free and good sites begin to charge to support their profit rather than blowing up in some Web 2.0 Adword Bubble later on I can see a few different ways to charge. Monthly subscriptions are an easy win for some sites and are already done today. $3.99 for all you can Facebook or $1.99 and you can’t upload more than 50 pictures a month of you at some bar drinking with your friends. Maybe articles on CNN are $.10 a piece. My life is chaotic at times and I might not want to pay $9.99 a month to a news site that I might visit heavily at one point and never for a month. 10 articles for $1 seems fair, as long as the journalism is there… and I think that’s what I’m paying for. Maybe pay4news will slowly kill the nothing news. When no one is paying to read about Paris Hilton’s Dog’s haircut maybe you won’t post an article to your site about it.

It seems like I should spend more time going over what I’ve written and grammar check or remove all the times I’ve repeated and over used words after having written this. But I’m not making money from my site so I don’t have time nor do I care.

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Three Great Ideas

I feel like a genius, great ideas keep coming to me too fast to even write a single one down. I have three right now.

Green Corn
As I was laying around hating myself for deciding to get my money’s worth at all you can drink 10-2 saturday night the topic of corn came up. I view myself as a humanitarian, always looking to better the world for the sake of all of the world.  Corn as you probably know is a food. Arguably it’s not a very healthy food, which is good, because that’s why this invention works. Humans have a hard time digesting this golden food product so when you eat it… it comes back. Regardless of health related issues people will still eat it. I’ve decided we should make the best of it by recycling the corn.

Using my patent pending hypothetical technology known as Kernel Recognition Technology (KRT) my invention will sift through human waste searching for corn. The CornCleaner will attach to any drain line of a house and collect good corn for reuse. The corn will be stored in a special Rubber Maid container that will email you when your corn is 80% full and ready to be harvested. I think as technology progresses SMS reminders and additions to your google calendar telling you to change the corn holder may also be available. Through special grants and government funding I’d hope to make this invention free for anyone.

Increased Donation Dollars by Eliminating Awareness
Last week my cellphone bill was ready so I popped onto the Verizon Wireless site to pay it. On the first page was something I just can’t get away from seeing. “Text [somenumber] to send $10 to Haiti.” Then that’s when the light bulbs started going off. My thought is that the point of fund raising is not to annoy people, but to raise money. The problem here is even if I give all the money I can to support the cause I’m still subjected to daily reminders that I need to be donating money. It’s not really fair and I think there’s a better way.

Each charity should have a Do Not Solicit limit and maybe levels leading up to it. For example, you decide you’ll donate $30 to Haiti. Next Ads for Haiti do not appear on your phone’s web site or on channels you only sometimes watch. $100 might get you most sites, your cable channels and maybe stop you from having to run a 5K, $200 and you never have to hear about Haiti donations again. This girl at work argued with me that my idea might lower donation dollars but I don’t think so. I think the people who are going to donate big bucks will already do that anyway and the people like me who don’t really donate will donate to save our sanity.

Some charity organizations should have time limits though. For example if you pay $200 to an AIDS or Cancer organization your tribute only lasts for X amount of time. Haiti will be rebuilt but Diabetes isn’t cured yet. Charity will need to be categorized. There’s no way I can donate to every cause, and there might even be some I don’t believe in. A few weeks ago during Holmes on Homes Sarah McLachlan hosted a commercial about saving poor hungry, cats. Yes I know some of you are like “YES CATS ARE MISTREATED EVERY DAY” but honestly there are so many other things I’d want to give my money to before cats. For this reason a final donation category should be created called “OPT OUT”.

After you’ve paid X dollars to four different classifications of charity you pay an additional larger sum to OPT OUT to remove the remainder of ads for your life for one calendar year. OO will take its money and redistribute it  amongst all the remaining legitimate charities by % of donations they usually receive. So if it shows American Red Cross receives 50% of all American dollar donations per year they get 50% of OO money. This will stop people for starting random charities and gaining money through the program.

New Facebook Filters
There’s a serial flaw in the way Facebook does privacy. Either someone can see a certain feature or they can’t. I can block you from seeing all my wall posts or you can see them. I think a better approach would be able to block people based on words that appear in the posts. Someone decides to say all sorts of naughty words all over my wall, well now I can set that as a filter and none of my coworkers can see that. I don’t want to block them from seeing my entire wall; that doesn’t seem fair.

I just don’t want want to end up like my coworker Earl who constantly has his status updates say crude and unusual things. I think this would also be great for all of you like me who have family on their FaceBook. Hi Mom look at my awesome wallpost about my friends talking about me getting wasted and pissing off the roof of their condo!

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