Category: Etc

The 2003 world press photo competition, something I hadn’t heard of until 20 minutes ago, has produced some of the most fascinating, beautiful and terrible pictures I’ve seen in a long time.

They are a year of the world painted primarily with pain. A portrait of a confused and sickly planet.

Some of them have the feeling of a classical painting, while others feel more like some kind of demented action film.

They are all good.

Now it’s one thing to read about comment spamming in Wired News, but it’s another thing entirely to actually have someone comment, twice, about their boyfriend’s successful penis-enlargement experience on a post I wrote two months ago quoting something beautiful Augustine said about knowledge.

I mean, seriously, “The confidence…, the courage!” !? What the hell does that mean? The idea here is that the presence of the links on popular (ha ha) pages improves their Google rating, but this person actually seems to expect clickthroughs because of the great writing.

The internet is a very strange place my friends. And my penis is not nearly large enough for it.

i’m trying to tweak the design (to make it pure css etc.) so there may be wonkyness ahead. please ignore it if you can.

if not you can go back to russia.

Despite its 85% porn saturation and aiding and abetting of hate-mongers all over the world, the internet is sometimes known for getting something right. (article from Wired news)

As just about everyone knows by now, same-sex couples have been streaming into San Francisco by the hundreds from all across the United States to get married.

thanks to the Internet, there’s also been beauty, in the form of hundreds of bouquets of flowers that have been delivered to couples waiting in line for their marriage licenses. These flowers have been ordered and paid for by total strangers, people from all over the world wanting to share in the good feeling happening in San Francisco and wanting to show that they believe marriage is a civil right that should be available to any two people, not just to a man and a woman.

you can read the article here.

Also, for those visually inclined, a guy called Derek Powazek took some lively pictures of the event that you can check out here.

I think that the city of San Francisco has done a great thing with this, and the amazing generosity of flower givers proves that it is a great day for both freedom of life advocates, and internet-idealists. Thank you The Internet.

So I’m reading Cory’s new book, which features a world where everyone seems to have a “comm” (a kind of cellphone-PDA hybrid but that seems to do anything a laptop can, with the added feature of wireless intercommunication for things like instant payments etc), and the main character pulls out a keyboard and velcroes it to his leg and starts typing. Not unreasonably, I think:

“How could a whole keyboard fit on the top of your leg? Is it balancing precariously? Are the keys tiny and ridiculous? Did the author even consider this”?”

It would seem obvious that He had some kind of idea when he was writing, but was it really viable?

Keyboards as we know them are great. I love mine like it was my baby, and as soon as I got my ridiculous contraption of a keyboard for my Visor I started typing five times as much as I was previously inputting with the stylus.

But, WHY are our keyboards such valuable tools?

I’ve spent the last 9 years developing my keyboard skills and can now realistically hit about 50 words per minute if it’s dumb shit. I have taught my hands, using software, perseverance and ridiculous amounts of time instant messaging, that if they will just move in the most un-handlike ways for a few minutes, they will have a happy brain to be attached to, and it won’t subject them to the awkward aches of writing on paper (which I hate. seriously.)

But my (and hopefully your) success doesn’t prove anything about the keyboards we use (called “QWERTY” after the first 6 letters in the top left corner). We’ve already seen that both ergonomic keyboards (the split kind) and the “Dvorak” layout can make our experiences of our keyboards more comfortable and easy, but the adaptability issue is a great one, and individuals are no more willing to go out of their way than are the companies who build soft and hard ware.

But even beyond that we have to realize that our entire concept of what a keyboard is, is arbitrary. They were invented in the 1800’s without any consideration whatsoever towards what our hands should really be doing. They were built, both in terms of general design (keys all laid out with one per character) and layout (QWERTY) with the mechanical needs of the time in mind. It had to be big enough to have buttons you could really bash to send the hammer home, popular keys like “E” had to be in awkward places, so the typists wouldn’t go to fast and jam the hammers… etc.

But we’re used to it, and we don’t want to relearn to type, and we love our keyboards like they’re our babies, but what about mobile computing? Like in the example from EST (see top) it seems essentially ridiculous to try to make a normal keyboard into a wearable or holdable size, our hands just aren’t built to have to deal with buttons that small, and in such a random configuration.

ENTER TECHNO-ANOMALY:
The CyKey. Invented in the 70’s by a couple of guys in England, this intuitive little piece of cyber-magic obviously didn’t make it’s creators rich or famous, rather it became just another example of failed innovation.

Access to an entire keyboard worth of characters with only five keys (more with functions). One hand free to do anything you want (hold a PDA for example, or drink a coke, or have been eliminated by catastrophe). The ability to type 30-50 words per minute without moving your hand out of its natural and comfortable position.

But a learning curve you could kill goats with. The great thing about the standard keyboard setup is the fact that every key has a nifty and useful little visual metaphor emblazoned on it that lets you know exactly which pixels on the screen will light up when you push it. This means that, though it takes years (or crazy intensive work) to get GOOD with a QWERTY keyboard, essentially anyone who knows how to spell can use it without any previous instruction (and some continue their whole lives without moving beyond that point, hunting and pecking).

With the CyKey on the other hand, you have to devote a half hour initially to learn the chording system it uses to input all the different characters (kind of like a piano, but if you never had to move your hands off the keys). But once you have learned it, you are eternally free to type at normal speeds with one hand totally free (as ineloquently described in a cute but also depressingly lo-fi video you can find here.)

And it’s wireless now. Running on the infrared ports that come ready-installed on all Palm OS PDA’s (like mine) and can essentially be ported to anything (also the technology and idea could be adapted for other transfer formats). You just pull it out and start typing and the PDA or computer hears.

It could go anywhere you wanted. Your leg? Your forearm? The side of your head? The possibilities are pretty much limitless, and because, unlike keyboards, it’s built for a hand you don’t have to see it to be able to use it. It’s intuitive enough that you can have it in a totally different part of your vision from the screen (say a palm pilot that has to stay close to your face).

THIS IS EXITING! I AM THOROUGHLY EXCITED!

Of course, no one is buying it. The guy who built it seems to be living out of his basement, and, as such, the units are a bit pricier than they really should/would be, going for about 80 British pounds (160$canadian?).

It’s kind of absurd to think that totally portable computing is here, staring us in the face, begging us to move forward a few feet and catch up with it, in the basement of some guy in England who invented it 30 years ago, when computers were just gaining steam and he realized that the keyboards we used (and use) suck.

Yes, your close friend and (seemingly) greatest ally, Microsoft Internet Explorer is indeed quite likely the worst browser you could be using to look at the internet (of course this is a gross exageration, especially considering a recent experience I had with an ass old copy of Netscape Navigator). Without getting into the details of it, IE works in such a way that it makes the jobs of web-designers everywhere far more difficult than it has to be, failing to support functions, misrepresenting layouts etc.

also, it is owned by pure evil.

“But what can I do?” you might be asking. Well it’s your lucky day, because Mozilla has just released a brand new version of their amazing browser Firefox. It has all the obvious features of internet explorer, as well as a horde of new (if you’re using IE) and awesome things, such as tabbed browsing (an amazing way to organize your web wanderings), as well as totally functional integrated popup blocking.

Most importantly though, mozilla and Firefox are both open-source which means that I have a very good reason to convince you to use it, because, like every other human, I own the rights to it. Along with the free operating system Linux, Mozilla was created through the cooperation of a huge pool of programmers who donated their time to create something they could be proud of and give to their children. It’s electronic communism on a humongous and functioning scale, and you can take advantage of it even using the evils of Windows and MacOS.

Give it a chance and you’ll be hooked. I promise.

Of course, we all know what my favorite Dostoevskiesque metaphor for human beings is *ahem, cough cough.*

Just wanted to point out that Nietzsche, similarly awesome, refers to humans in Beyond Good and Evil as The Conceited Ape. (paragraph 222)

Of course, he also says, in all seriousness, that if women were indeed intelligent creatures, they would have learned to be better cooks by now. (paragraph 234)

That darn Nietzsche.

This morning I was given a fine of $205 (two hundred and five dollars), one hundred and fifty for my transgression, fifty-five for processing, by the friendly officers of my local public transit authority, the STM.
Clearly, given the enormous amount of money required by the fine, I must have committed a formidable crime, or, if I did not commit a crime as such I surely in some way caused them a great problem, grievance and financial loss. For them to be willing to charge a student, who’s bi-weekly paycheck rarely totals $300, a two hundred and five dollar fine, he or she would surely have to be the author of some astronomically malevolent transgression against all that is holy, public, and transitory.

To clarify the extent of my crime I’d like to outline some other crimes, and their associated fines. (I assume “costs” is the fifty-five dollar processing fee)

-$75 plus costs- Riding a bicycle in a metro station.
-$75 plus costs- Delaying a train’s departure.
-$75 plus costs- Damaging a vehicle or building or defacing it with graffiti.
(Semi-questionable as a $125 fine, but all are either directly destructive, or dangerous for those around you)

-$100 plus costs- Hanging on to the exterior of an STCUM vehicle.
-$100 plus costs- Walking on the tracks in a tunnel.
(Both highly dangerous for the individual, as well as highly condusive to slowing down movement within the system, and as such causative of financial loss for the transit authority)

Taking all these into consideration a fine of one hundred and fifty dollars plus fifty-five dollars in “costs” would unquestionably require an act like say:

-$150 plus costs- Attacking a transit employee or customer.
-$150 plus costs- Theft in a metro station.
-$150 plus costs- Explicit destruction of transit property.

Right?

…

My crime (as outlined on the STM’s helpful “urban transit myths” page):

-$150 plus costs- Not having the STCUM’s reduced fare ID card when paying a reduced fare.

An eight-dollar bus photo I.D. that proves that you are a student (despite the absolute abundance of student cards from institutions) is the reason that I will have no money for the next two weeks. When approached by the security officers it was not denied that I was in fact a student, nor whether I was an honest to goodness resident of greater Montreal. It was merely ascertained that I not acquired their pass and I was fined accordingly. 150$, in fact, seems to be the maximum fine possible, including straight-out theft of service by not paying fare (jumping the turnstiles). Despite my status as a student, living in Montreal, under the age of 24, who had paid the 31$ for a pass for students, I was clearly in violation of the most sacred code of such institutions: DONT FUCK WITH OUR BUROCRACY. I had skimped on the paper work and am now paying two hundred and five dollars for the privilege.

A few days ago Cory Doctorow decided to give away his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe on the internet. It is available in all kinds of formats and is the kind of science-fiction that is pretty much guaranteed to rock your world. He combines the wacky evilness of today with the slight advances of tomorrow to create a world that’s both smirkworthy, and apprehensively depressing. It’s also very short. so you do have time to read it.

As well, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is Cory’s first novel that he gave away on the internet; also quirkily rad.

What he’s doing with this represents something totally new on the electronic frontier. I mean, people have been giving their creative content away on the internet since it began, but only now is the trend becomming that even non-internet content (both of Doctorow’s books were and are published in dead-tree format as well) is being given away on the net even as it’s just being released into stores. It’s kind of like a pre-emptive strike against content pirates ; “so you’re going to copy my book and give it away on kazaa? i’ll beat that! i’ll host it on my site, fucker.” ).

And it works.

Authors who double realease their books like this (under a Creative Commons licence, which is a copyright that allows the creator to choose the conditions necessary for copying, manipulating and performing the work) see uniformly greater success than other internet authors. When one author’s book, was released for free on the internet the used copies of it on amazon went up in price by 40%!

Of course, this could easily be attributed to the fact that that particular author only distributed his book in pdf format, which is wholly unworkable except on a desktop, where few people want to sit and read a 300 page book about linux. But even the sales of Doctorow’s books, which are available in (and portable to) all formats, can be attributed to this, as many people, hooked by their internet meanderings with the texts, probably wanted a copy in the one format that they are really used to. This leads back to the core of the question (at least for me), which is not whether the internet is an effective promotional tool (whether the promotion involves the seemingly foolheaded act of giving away thousands and thousands of copies or not) , but if it is an effective distribution tool. Is there money to be made off of those electronic copies? And will be makeable without the help of the bloated traditional publishers?

Of course, that’s just the kind of thing that Cory deals with in Eastern Standard Tribe, so you really should go read it.

today i received e-mail viruses not just for myself, but also for Mary, Adam and Robert (all @simianuprising.com). These people and adresses do not exist.
Whoever’s idea it was to make the virus randomly generate likely adresses for every domain name is just plain mean.

also, if you are interested in my rambling thoughts concerning the commnications theory of digital media you may or may not want to check out my class blog for intro to digital media. WARNING: IT IS DRY AND DISTINCTLY LACKING IN EXCITEMENT.