Cellphone cams produce odd pictures, yet oddly compelling. I like the washed out look; it feels good. It gives it a certain worn quality, that makes it look old. A nice contrast to the crisp of the sea wind blowing over the hilltop.
Ah, February in Victoria.
Been a while since I posted anything political, but to the americans out there, your Democracy nearly died yesterday, and is on its last legs. You really ought to write any congressmen (specifically House members, as opposed to Senators) that you can and let them know that they need to reject the Senate's version of the FISA bill, as retroactive immunity for telecoms who participated in warrantless eavesdropping is basically the act that seals the deal in your transition from democracy to soft totalitarianism.
Being 100% serious here, by the way. This is pretty arcane legal stuff, but the Law is where democracy lives and dies. And you can't even blame this one on one party or the other; this is an epic fail from both of them.
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/02/hbc-9
Seriously. Call & email a congressman. I don't care if its the only political act you take in your life, this one's important.
Cheers,
Steven
- Location:Not the USA
- Mood:
morose
So, I hear a knock on the door. M is in the washroom, so I go answer. Lo and behold, it's the pizza guy with a delivery! I'm like, "Oh, Maura's pizza." So I cough up the bones, pay the delivery guy, and bring the pizza upstairs. By that time, M is out of the washroom and I'm like "Oh hey, I got your pizza."
She says, "lolwut? I didn't order pizza."
So I respond, "Uhhh...neither did I. Why did i just pay for pizza, then?"
She says, "I have no idea."
Fuck. Check the receipt, and its for somebody else next door.
So I call the pizza place who delivered, got on the phone, and said "....yeah, so I'm an occasional customer who's not very smart. You delivered a pizza to my door, mistakenly, and due to massive miscommunication, I paid for it. However, we have established that nobody wants this pizza at this apartment, nor did anybody order it. Can you send the pizza delivery person back? We haven't touched the pizza."
The chick on the line was sitting there going, "zomglolwtf," and then claimed, while laughing, that she'd talk to her manager. Her manager gets on, and basically hits me with a "lololol, that's never happened before," then says she'll send the delivery person by.
10, 20, 30 minutes go by. No delivery person. I'm sweating, because this pizza is getting cold AND i want my money back.
Eventually, the delivery person shows up, claims that they just gave new pizza to the people who ordered it, hands my money back, and then says "Well, that pizza would just be thrown out if I take it, so it's all yours if you want." I said, "well, sure!"
So, M and I got free pizza because I was a complete retard. It was good pizza, too; chicken, hot peppers and some other stuff, on a thin crust.
also, it is SO HARD not to hack my damn phone and get rid of the branding. SO HARD.
but I like warranties, so the phone is safe.
for now.
- Location:The Situation Room
- Mood:
amused
...This closing down of concern for others is echoed by Scandinavian research. Academics discovered the middle classes supported greater equality of opportunity in education only as long as the middle class was expanding - in other words, only on condition that their children's social position was not threatened by others' upward mobility. Last week researchers at Oxford University concluded that Britain was in just that position. There was a big expansion of the middle classes from the 60s to the 90s, but the academics warned it was a one-off event. From now on, any upward mobility would have to be matched by someone else's downward mobility.
Source
Because I refuse to use a contract for reasons that are somewhat geopolitical in nature (the North American cell industry is the worst in the world and the need for contracts is nuts), I'll be buying a phone outright. That's costly, yeah.
The problem? I am a technology whore of the worst kind. The worst kind.
I'm thinking of getting this bad boy here -- the Motorola Razr 2 V9. I know, I am committing the worst of sins. Paying too much for something too new.
I've long expressed hatred of cellphones. Talk me out of it. Hurry.
- Location:Work
- Mood:
greedy
I've been thinking of opening my wireless network. Currently, it's pretty secure -- WAP2, zero broadcasting, MAC filters, and so on. It's a sort of iron curtain, and it keeps the computers on my system secure and invisible and difficult to detect.
But having my wireless invisible and locked down somewhat violates some of the things about an information futurestructure that I find useful; that is, the idea that wireless should be pervasive and open; that you should be able to wander around town, get a signal whenever you need it, and talk to the internet.
Pervasive internet, an informational field that cloaks our civilization, is the goal, is it not? Like electricity, or the law, it should always be available, always active, wherever you need it.
I could open my network right now, of course. I could tunnel into my router from work, flip a few settings, and BAM! Suddenly its visible, the door is unlocked, and anybody can hop a ride on Wireless-N goodness.
There are considerations, of course. First of all, how would I secure local devices? I run a WinXp PC and a vista Laptop, and I would have to lock those bad boys down. We're talk soft firewalls. I'd have to make them invisible to each other on the network. Same with any devices that hooked into it; I don't want somebody sniffing out the map of my net and then poking around the innards of my PC.
Then there's bandwidth issues, as well; I don't want somebody hijacking my crappy Shaw bandwidth to torrent teh pr0n. That seems uncool.
And, of course, there's the murky grey area of liability. I have no idea how case law works in Canada with respect to crime committed on open networks, in the event I had somebody do Very Bad Things from my network.
I suppose I could get around the bandwidth issue by local traffic-shaping. I could make every device not my own a second class citizen, and have to wait in line for my own greedy bandwidth needs. I might do that.
Anybody out there run an open network? How do you protect your devices?
- Location:Work
- Mood:
thoughtful
I have severed the direct linkage between here and there (there being that bastard sea of social contagion known as Facebook), because I'm no longer comfortable with my thoughts here showing up there. I don't like that place. It's deadly ground, full of savages. Those men eat the flesh of their dead.
So what shall I talk about? Shall I tell you about dinners thrown, christmas parties engaged, eggnog that was more rum than nog (a powerful draught, that), trips over three mountain ranges to pay respect to the famiy -- there, and back again? Shall I tell you about all the things i have seen, of magic dance floors and genius ideas and the engagement of good friends (props,
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
asmoandrew). Shall we speak at length of this and that, while I tell you in no uncertain terms about the magic that is winter?
Truth is, I started this livejournal as a ledger, into which I could deposit my thoughts and experience, and later, my photography, and at the end, dip my hand into it and count the coin of life lived, and tally the interest. I posted a list, in 2004, of all my experiences in one year, captured in digital film; it was magnificent; they are gone. Such is the way of hosting and the internet.
Such historical aspirations have become strangely less appealing, though. But I don't love you any less, my conquered internet; trust what I say, not what I do. No, despite the influence of the Russians on this space, and despite an ever-increasing wash of business, and an ever-expanding interest in a great many things, I don't haunt this place so much, anymore.
What shall I do?
Rededication, my friends! Like the refit of ancient warship into a modern naval museum, so shall I resurrect the cold and lonely feature-poor pages of this Livejournal, and with a splash of dictive alchemy, render strange transmutation upon these barren and bleached pages.
Of all the things I miss about LJ, I miss the playground of words. I don't get to fiddle with them very often, anymore. Such a pity.
I will check back here with more regularity, and perhaps tell you about life.
But then again, those Russians...they're watching. Damn those Russians.
Also, I hope you're all having a happy new year. It's too late for season's greetings (unless you're Greek Orthodox, which you may be, if you're from Russia. Hrmm.)
- Location:Not Russia
"The Rule of Law is fundamental to our existence as a civilized nation. The Rule of Law is not a goal which we merely aspire to achieve; it is the floor below which we must not sink. For the Rule of Law to function effectively, however, it must provide actual rules that can be followed. In this instance, the relevant rule—the law—has long been clear: Waterboarding detainees amounts to illegal torture in all circumstances."
--Letter to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee by four former Judge Advocates General of the United States Armed Forces.
November, 2007
--Source
- Location:Home
- Mood: thoughtful
Dear Steve:
We are pleased to confirm that you have been authorized to re-register
for Winter Session, 2007-2008. PLEASE NOTE THAT REGISTRATION IN WINTER
SESSION BEGINS IN LATE JUNE. Your registration date and time will show
on WebView starting May 10.
If this email has been sent after May 10, your registration date/time
will not show on WebView until 24 hours after the time this email
was sent.
To access WebView, link to http://www.uvic.ca/webview then select
"Authorization to Register and Registration Access Date" AND the Session
option of "2007-2008 Winter".
The following websites provide timetable, registration and course
information:
- Registration and Timetables (http://www.registrar.uvic.ca/undergrad/)
- WebTimeTable (http://www.uvic.ca/webtt)
- WebReg (http://www.uvic.ca/webreg)
- WebView (http://www.uvic.ca/webview)
- UVic Calendar (http://www.uvic.ca/calendar)
**IMPORTANT: Your status in the session is "on probation". You
**will need to obtain a minimum sessional grade point average of
**2.00 in order to qualify for continued studies at UVic. Please
**refer to Sample Letters/Information Regarding Academic Standing
**on the UVic Records website:
** http://registrar.uvic.ca/undergrad/registration/
**for important information.
Best wishes in your studies.
Records and Registrarial Services
University of Victoria
Ah hell. Now I need to find some courses to take. Gonna be a busy weekend.
HELLO
My name is doris i am a female I was impressed when i saw your profile and i will like to establish a long lasting relationship with you. In addition,i will like you to reply me through my e mail box ({email scrubbed for this LJ post, so as not to spam}) This is because i dont know the possibilities of remaining in forum for a long time. please If you are interested in knowing more about me, and for me to send you some pictures of mine,
please reply me back through my email and with your email so that i can contact you
Thanks waiting to hear from you .
doris
Ah, Doris. How could I ever refuse such romantic spam?
I had been walking all day, indeed, I had been walking for a week or two, and I remember thinking, "This business of connecting with people far away, it's damned hard work!"
And so I sat atop ancient stone, the pitted legacy of one of the world's three great Mosques turned Christian Church, and selfishly whined to myself about the fact that travelling took some sweat.
( And so I'll muse again, after so long gone. )
The other way that I look at torture is as a metaphor for disaster capitalism. Disaster capitalism is an attempt to push through policies in the chaos and disorientation that follow a disaster -- policies that wouldn't stand a chance during normal, non-disastrous circumstances. The move to turn New Orleans public housing into condos after Katrina is a classic example. So is the current campaign to push through a highly contested oil law in Iraq, even as the country spirals into civil war.
What I argue is that this attempt to take advantage of the window of opportunity opened up by crisis has some uncomfortable similarities to the techniques for psychological torture laid out in declassified CIA interrogation manuals, which I quote in the book. For instance, the infamous 1963 Kubark manual talks about how to put a prisoner in a state of shock, using various regression techniques like sensory deprivation and sensory overload. Then it states that "there is an interval -- which may be extremely brief -- of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis. It is caused by a traumatic or sub-traumatic experience which explodes, as it were, the world that is familiar to the subject as well as his image of himself within that world. Experienced interrogators recognize this effect when it appears and know that at this moment the source is far more open to suggestion, far likelier to comply, than he was just before he experienced the shock."
The first time I read that, it reminded me of the shock of Sept. 11, which, for millions of people, exploded "the world that is familiar" and opened up a period of deep disorientation and regression that the Bush administration expertly exploited. I want to stress that I am not in any way suggesting that a crisis like that was deliberately created in order to induce the state of shock, but I do argue that once the shock occurred it was deliberately deepened. And more to the point, the impulse to exploit a moment of disorientation opened up by mass trauma is, I believe, deeply immoral, in the same way that torture is immoral, because it is about exploiting an extreme power imbalance.
--Naomi Klein
(source)
- Location:Work
- Mood: working
- Music:Muse - Assassin
August 31, 2007 -- Schools Chancellor Joel Klein yesterday fired a veteran worker whose movements were tracked for five months through the GPS device in his cellphone, leading to charges that he was repeatedly cutting out early.
source
It's interesting that grid applications are fading in from the authoritarian end of things, from the top, as it were, rather than from the ground up. Employers tracking employees, parents tracking children, and so on.
But, on examination, this is probably to be expected, since the GPS system is a military creation, and it takes tech a while to shake off the jackboots.
This story is interesting, incidentally, because it highlights the effect of technology trickling down from institutionalized sources; the matching of GPS tracking to personal movements may seem Orwellian, but I'm of the opinion that it's destined to become paired with the social graph in an uplifting and enabling sense.
Technologies like Twitter and Facebook, as they become more portable and hooked-in with Wi-Fi, and eventually things like the GPS, are just natural fits.
What are interfaces like cellphones and blackberries designed to do but to network? That's their purpose. Facebook operates a function called "status;" that is, a short blurb, set at any time, of what you're doing.
Twitter is designed entirely around this idea, and people who use it in groups swear by it; it promotes a sort of social consciousness of what people are doing in the minutiae in their day-to-day. Read twitter, and you see that some people are working in their kitchen. Others are en route to school. Others are bored, waiting for trains. Snapshots in time throughout their day; heavy users essentially map a portion of their life.
GPS and cellphones are destined to fuse with this, and to produce the next generation of social application. Currently, advanced cell networks transfer sufficient data for content-rich applications. The GPS system or cell towers can already map data on locations.
What happens when you have a social graph like Facebook or twitter that can hook into the GPS system and cell system, and manage some updates automatically? What happens when users of that system can specify narrow networks of people to whom they can grant access to their GPS status?
Ad hoc social networks, moving in real-time, mapped in real time. User-generated social maps; network landmarks, relevant to small-scale social networks. Leave the house, pull out your cellphone, turn the ringer on, pop on-grid, take a look at your social atlas, and see five people you know clustered at a dart bar, three more at a movie theatre, and the rest at home. Head over to the bar, without need to call anybody or ask anybody. Just drop by.
Social consciousness goes geographic through GPS and trust networks. Privacy is illusory in an institutional sense, but assured socially, because appearance socially on the grid is entirely voluntary.
Privacy advocates will freak out about it when it debuts, and call it Orwellian, but they'll lose the argument; a real-time social grid is the natural evolution of the telephone. Seems like a toy now, but it'll eventually fade into necessity.
The odd thing is that this doesn't really exist in a wide-scale, if it does at all, but it must; it's natural for the technology, which is currently omnipresent. It's just a case where the regulatory model and business model are absent.
But things will change. Some technologies are so natural and obvious you can't fight them.
- Location:The situation room
- Mood: thoughtful
- Music:Kanye West - Can't Tell me Nothing
Hello,
I am the general editor of a five volume academic reference series on the backgrounds to the Bible. One of my responsibilities is to gather photos for the project. I encountered your photo on Flickr "Enki and Hammurabi" from the British Museum and would like to request your permission to use it in my book. I would need non-exclusive world rights in all languages for both print and digital formats. Certainly you will be given credit in the work for your photo. If you are willing, please let me know how you would like the photo credit to read.
I look forward to hearing from you.
By the way, in case you are interested, the seated god is Shamash, not Enki, and he is not giving Hammurabi the law, he is simply wielding the emblems of his authority.
John H. XXXX
This isn't the first time that I've had somebody solicit me for use of some of my photos in a commercial fashion. Some of my photos of Madrid have been used in some sort of online travel publication.
One fellow asked to use my picture of the Barbary Ape on Gibraltar for the logo for his film company. I thought about it at length, of course, but declined on the basis that it's my favorite picture, of all the ones that I've taken. For some reason, I just didn't want to deal with granting licenses for such a thing. I'd prefer access to that picture, permanently, and yet, strangely, I'm completely happy with that picture being licensed under the creative commons; I don't mind people using it, I just don't want to be locked out from it.
But these are examples of what might be called an internet fade-out; increasing, the internet becomes less a discrete thing and becomes a vehicle, as it was meant to be. It's halfway to Electricity, but it's not there, yet. When we get pervasive, high-speed public Wi-Fi?
Then it'll be here.
But the internet is no longer a place to hide anymore; between the various social graphs, the confluence of accessible rich media, the effects of self-mediation on identity, we find ourselves illuminated on the internet according to the scope of our own efforts at excise and emphasis.
Those of us in this world who are wealthy enough to live with access to the internet are becoming, by our own volition, catalogued; a transient human index, if you will, shifting according to trend and pattern.
The index is evolving, of course; blogs are fading, becoming absorbed into the social graph, or branching out and expanding into very legitimate media outlets, such as tpmmuckraker.com
Who still has a "homepage?" Not many; they are contained in the social graph, as well. So we come to Facebook and it's ilk, and Livejournal and Blogger become relics, unless they change with the times, but i don't think they can or will. The internet churns and reinvents itself, striving blindly to vanish and fade away through of force of pervasive presence.
For a few years, I was really interested in creating an outline of the self on the internet; experiments in self-mediation, and it was moderately successful. I really began to understand the nature of the internet as a tool for self-definition in medial terms, but it's limitations are apparent. Still, I feel like I personally need a reboot. I'm closing on 14 years of consistent e-dentity(?), and maybe that needs fixing.
And I'm always puzzled, to this day, when the meatspace invades the electronic; for so long, there was such a hard line between the hard and the real and the ephemera of the web, but that line has become chalky and mute, and is washing away. There is little distinction, anymore, between life and the internet, and such distinctions must become more and more archaic.
Does omnipresence translate, then, to banality? Perhaps. And so it goes.
Regardless, I'm uncertain as to whether or not I'll pass this photo on to the gentleman with the biblical book. I think I probably will, as there's so much rich material out there, it'll comfort me to think that mine will be used positively.
Also: Hi to all you people out there; I know I've been out of touch of late. Consider it a consequence of a changing understanding of the internet. I haven't quite yet processed how to grapple with where it's going, so I haven't yet settled on a plan of action. I find LJ puzzling and somewhat frustrating for what I want to accomplish, and I find Facebook alternately disturbing, frustrating, and completely absurd. I have a Facebook inbox filled with memetic junk, and I've settled for apathetic build-up over sifting and sorting.
Rest assured, though, life is going well for me. Very busy, all the time. I tend to be quite chipper, have been here and there, really ought to upload more pics.
- Location:the situation room
- Mood:
cheerful - Music:Kanye West -- Barry Bonds (ft. lil Wayne)
In one of the handful of opportunities I had to watch Gore deliver his global warming Keynote, I recognized a link in the problem that he was describing and the work that I have been doing during this past decade. After talking about the basic inability of our political system to reckon the truth about global warming, Gore observed that this was really just part of a much bigger problem. That the real problem here was (what I will call a "corruption" of) the political process. That our government can't understand basic facts when strong interests have an interest in its misunderstanding.
--Lawrence Lessig
Indeed.
- Location:Work
In a society where Professionalism might be defined as "The correct execution of Judgment in adverse circumstances," the fallout of that failure of judgment is really quite fascinating. We have a long tradition of vilifying and turning our backs on people when their judgment is shown to have been poor, and, obviously, nobody wants their reputation sullied by exposure as having been wrong, as having been the victim of wishful thinking, or having been taken in by the propaganda and lies of people who have been duplicitous. Nobody wants that sort of stain on their reputation.
Now, make no mistake; I am not here to defend those people who, in their fear and ardor for retribution, either voted for or argued for the war in Iraq. Nor is this, directly, about Iraq itself; but it is tangentially related and perhaps best illustrated by the punditry that enmeshed Iraq, and the Bush presidency. What I am interested in is the absolute refusal, nearly across the board, to admit to having been wrong, or to having misjudged the situation.
In a society that, ostensibly, values knowledge, and a society wherein the Scientific Method (if there is such a thing) is premised upon the theory that nobody can be absolutely correct, one might think that this simple idea might be taken for granted: Everybody will make an error, sooner or later. In fact, this simple idea seems basic and utterly germane to the most fundamental workings of the human mind.
We make a decision, we act on that decision, if that action fails, we re-evaluate and then adapt. This, in many ways, might be considered the original core advantage of the human creature; we can voluntarily change our behaviour when presented with information that suggests our behaviour is no longer advantageous.
But the whole of Professionalism seems to be adverse to this very idea; it seems to me that, in Civil society, and especially in Professional society, where "Professional" standards are levied upon individuals, that the concept of "Error" is seen as dangerous, especially in the context of those who place upon themselves the mantle of "Expert."
This seems incongruous to me; shouldn't the expert, above all and beyond any other, be most interested in the idea of his own failure?
Through the whole Iraq affair, one pundit after another has loudly claimed that "The war in Iraq was just, and that WMD must be found and destroyed," despite ample evidence to the contrary, had one been willing to look at it. Obviously, fear and anger over 9/11 was a cause, as well. Now, I am prepared to forgive people's passions overwhelming them, and I am prepared to forgive what might be called some groupthink in the face of the drive for War; I don't think many Americans were prepared for the sophisticated propaganda that was deployed by the Republicans and the Bush Administration for the Iraq War; it was of the sort that hasn't been seen in decades, and our civil tradition was reliant upon various institutions that had been compromised to defend against it. So, in some ways, I can understand the average person being taken in. Anger and passion are powerful things, and previously, we had guardians against propaganda.
Experts, however, whether self-appointed or appointed by acclimation, should generally have known better. To be fair, many did, and they are certainly not my subject; many people actively campaigned against the War, and, like many, underestimated the machine they were fighting.
But the pundits, experts and highly educated men and women who agitated for the War, and who failed to use their education and resources to disprove the premises levied for the war, they are culpable. Enormously so. And what I don't understand is the endless prevariaction and avoidance of responsibility for this. It seems to me that defense of credibility lies not in the denial of error, but in the embrace of it.
Were I an expert and an educated man, and to my regret, I am not, I can think of no faster way to disarm my critics than to say, "Yes, I made the error. I was fooled. However, I will not repeat the error; I have learned from my mistake, and have adapted my thinking."
But instead, many people seem to treat the evidence of their lack of judgment as being anathema to their credibility; the simple idea that they, as paragons of their particular sphere of expertise, must be infallible to retain their credibility is simply incredible to me. It's a papal mindset, and patently absurd. I can't understand the thought process that goes into that.
Mea Culpas are hard, yes; I won't deny that. But shouldn't anyone interested in whether a person is truly a robust thinker be as interested in his admitted errors, as much as his successes? In our society, visible evidence of some miscalculation frequently disqualifies you from further progression in a field. And, where such errors are endemic, this seems reasonable. But where these errors were fuel for shifts in thinking, it seems to me that they should be considered assets, evidence of an agile mind.
I'm not in charge of anybody, and perhaps that's due to this thinking. But for my part, I would be much more interested in having somebody on my team if he was candid about his failures, and expressed an interest in learning from them, rather than somebody who went to great lengths to deny or defend his decisions when they ended in disaster.
Context is crucial, and no man is perfect. But this endless defense of bad judgment in the face of incontrovertible evidence is something I find hard to fathom. There is no thing that makes me more suspicious than a man so interested in protecting himself that he can't admit his errors.
Professionalism searches for flawless men; what it finds, however, as we see in our court rooms and in these perpetual, revolving scandals, is evidence of corrupt men, with pretensions to perfection.
A flawless man seems much more dangerous to me than one who has had his share of failures, and I distrust those who would seek to portray their flawless judgment.
Insane donor 'rational to give to Tories'
David Hencke, Westminster correspondent
Tuesday July 24, 2007
The Guardian
A consultant psychiatrist yesterday argued that a "delusionary insane" Tory donor had been "rational and logical" to leave millions of pounds to the Conservatives to fight "satanic monsters" and "dark forces" around the world.
Robert Howard, an expert in disputed wills by mentally ill people, was giving evidence at the high court on behalf of the Conservative party in a battle between Zoran Kostic, son of a multimillionaire businessman who disinherited him, and the Tories over an estate worth £10m.
Both sides accept that Branislav Kostic, Zoran Kostic's father, had been "delusionary insane" since 1985 when he divorced, broke off relations with his son and sister and claimed there was an international conspiracy of more than 100 people masterminded by sexually perverted pharmaceutical company executives to destroy "freedom, democracy and human purity".
source (via William Gibson)
- Location:Work
- Mood: amused
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