Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to min0taur!!! Have a great one!!

(re)Defining my terms: open, transparent, receptive

My recent post defining "openness" pulled in a surprising number of comments -- thank you. Thanks in particular to filkferengi's suggestion of "transparency" for the sending side of openness. I realized a few days later that "receptiveness" is a better word than "open-mindedness" for the receiving side.

So, just to get down to the roots and make the definitions explicit...

One is transparent when one is sharing information about oneself.

One is receptive when one is taking in and taking into account information about somebody else.

 

So where does this leave "openness"? Is it merely transparecy plus receptiveness? I think not -- I think there's a whole other aspect of it that I hadn't considered last time. (See how language affects thought? Now that I have good words for the two concepts I was trying to get at downwhen, I can pull them out and consider the remainder.) I think it's captured best in phrases of the form "open to new {ideas, possibilities, relationships}". It's less about the information than about one's relationship to that information. As we will see, this will allow us to capture the meaning of such things as an "open relationship".

So...

One is open to new information, relationships, possibilities, etc. when one is not merely receptive in those areas but ready to be receptive in them. Not necessarily actively seeking out opportunities to be receptive, but willing to persue them if they should come along.

Similarly, one is open about an area when one is ready to be transparent about that area when the occasion calls for it. (Note that I originally had "willing" instead of "ready" in these two definitions, but I think that "ready" better expresses the idea of active preparedness that I'm looking for.

It's worth noting that any kind of relationship requires a significant amount of both receptivity and transparency -- one has to be ready for both in order to be "open" in the more general sense.

A relationship is open when both parties in that relationship -- by extension all parties where applicable -- are open to new relationships. Similarly, a group is open when it is open to new members. Note that there may be -- and usually are -- quite restrictive conditions on this kind of openness.

 

As usual, comments are welcome. What are your definitions? Do mine seem to work, or am I still missing something or getting something wrong? Inquiring minds...

Happy Mother's Day!

A very happy Mother's Day to all the moms reading this, and most especially to my very own flower_cat. (I'll add my Mom here as well, though I'm pretty sure she's not reading my LJ. I'll call her in about half an hour.)

Meanwhile, I'm about to go wake the Cat and fix her some apple/buttermilk/buckwheat pancakes for breakfast.

10:08 Yummy. Hodgson Mill buckwheat pancake mix; substitute buttermilk for milk (it's what we had in the house...) and fold in half an apple, diced. (I ate the other half with blue cheese about an hour ago.) Served with maple butter we bought in the Toronto airport. As I said, yum.

10:18 The Younger Daughter brought down a lovely hand-made card, signed by both kids. She tried to apologize for not presenting a store-bought one, but we stopped her. Hand-made with love is always better.

An outing with the (rolly)Cat

After yummy pancakes for breakfast, the flower_cat went out for a Mother's Day shopping expedition. Unfortunately we didn't find most of the things we were looking for, but we had fun anyway.

A little surprisingly, the wheelchair does not fit in the back seat of my car; it probably would if the passenger-side front seat were pulled up all the way, but that's unlikely to happen. The best way to get it into the trunk is to reach over the chair, grab the folded crossbars between the spokes of the far wheel, and put it into the trunk diagonally, wheels first. Comparatively painless.

We went to Valley Fair, the local mall, mainly in search of three things: a pewter bud vase and a purple laptop bag for the Cat, a new bathroom scale, and a pair of Keen hiking boots for me. We found the scale. You'd think that a mall full of shoe stores would have at least one selling Keens, but you'd be wrong. Macy's had an astounding variety of men's shoes, none of which I'd be caught dead in (but which would kill my feet in short order if I tried). Many stores had an astounding variety of handbags, very few of which were purple and none of which the Cat would be caught dead carrying. Most were so bad that I wouldn't have wanted to be associated with anyone who wanted to carry one.

After the mall we headed for home; I set a course past the Rose Garden, so we stopped there. The wheelchair worked well on the paved paths, but bogged down in the grass. At that point we changed modes and the Cat used it as a walker. It was delightful; it must have been several years since the Cat walked in the Rose Garden. I hadn't realized that she didn't know where the Royal Amethyst was located.

At that point we were both a little too hungry, so we came home and had lunch: yogurt, granola, and strawberries. A little bread and cheese for me, as well. Yum.

Afternoon out

After a somewhat belated lunch I went out to see whether I could find some of the scarce items that had eluded us this morning. Mostly successful. The first stop was Mel Cotton's, the local camping- and sporting-goods store that's been a fixture on W. San Carlos since before we moved in. They didn't have my Keen boots, but they had a catalog. They'll place the order Monday. They also had purple bandanas -- I got one for the Cat.

Next to OSH -- Orchard Supply Hardware. That's another one that's been in the area since it really was mostly orchards; they had the light switch I needed for the sewing room (replacing a dimmer that completely loses when used on compact fluorescent bulbs, even if they say they're OK to use on a dimmer -- if you want mood lighting, maybe, but this is a sewing room: it needs light). They also had black, grey, and purple duct tape. Yay! (The black is for the Younger Daughter's friend; she wants to make a prom dress out of it.)

A quick run past Santana Row, where I might have found a bud vase, turned up a total absence of parking spaces. I came home, made a Mother's Day card, and did the dishes.

Happy hacking

The main bit of hackery for the day was diagnosing Tatooine, an aging Fry's windows box (long since dual booted with Debian) that started out in the office, and most recently was used in the bedroom as Colleen's machine. Replacing Seymore, a slightly older Fry's box.

Tatooine had developed the bad habit of rebooting in the middle of the Windows boot sequence. We retired it when it developed the even worse habit of shutting off in the middle of the Linux boot sequence.

This morning I took advantage of a moderately new Vantec power supply I had sitting around, and gave it a try. Linux worked, of course. Windows still reboots -- something must have become corrupt. (OK, Microsoft has been corrupt for years. But I digress.) I'll have to see if the Windows partition is readable at all; I may be able to run the Windows games via Wine.

I also have to see whether I can make Seymore run now. If I remember correctly, a new power supply didn't help it, but it's worth a try. If not, I can always cannibalize it.