June 29, 2004

again, this is going to be a two things entry.

thing #1/ I really like noodling around with phpwebsite. and blogware and operating systems.

thing #2/ I don't think I like making pretty pictures.. every time I open photoshop for a client I get the heebly jeeblies.

I pretty much figure it's a matter of my brain working with a pretty strict set of partitions, i've been installing nifty dynamic site generation tools on a couple of servers for weeks now, and my design aesthetic is in hibernation. I' d rather make nifty group and permission sets...

what I should do is listen to some relaxing minimal techno and try to imagine all the beautiful pixels coalescing into soimething brilliant. and not just think " oh g-d not another filter technique"

If I had a f__ing functional laptop running the gimp I could go work outside and maybe get inspired that way..

what I really want is a laptop with a viewfinder on the screen, then i could just take pictures of whatever caught my fancy while working and use that as a backdrop for whatever I am working on.

June 28, 2004

I just want to mention that;

#1/ I am exhausted

#2/ I just spent about 5 hrs looking for a phpwebsite security hack - in between searching for an entirely new cms

The hack is because the makers of phpwebsite, in the hopes of creating a very user friendly web management tool have all but de-fanged the whole idea of users and groups. (kind of like the NDP of the CMS world, just too dang nice for their own good)

It's weird, with the system, any user can see anything - just not neccesarily add to it.. or delete?? what if I want a secret page on my site that is only available to logged in users.. not until version 9.4. Luckily there is a hack that alters the menuman module and does what i want ( i hope).
The hack is here.

...and it only took 5 hrs and a long dark night of the soul where I seriously wondered whether I had picked the wrong system (I didn't - phewf)

So my feeling now about the land of CMS is this; you give up a lot trying to get something that your users will want to use. And if I knew more I could install something more complex and just re-do the interface to make it pretty for my people.

next time.

#3/ I also had to vote in a national election in which none of the candidates struck me as particularily good or excellent, they all seemed like variations of evil or dopey. (or, in the case of our current PM, a bizarre melange of both)

#4/ looking back over those 2 list items I realize I feel the same about the state of CMS design and about the state of Canadian politics. Nothing ideal just making do with what I can scratch out of the available resources.

Now if only there were a patch for the NDP or some sort of killer app that would result in the perfect party.

Which is, just in case you are wondering;

Middle of the road enough for my aunt and uncle but radical enough to actually change the country

a committed environmental group.
Focused on developing education
Focused on developing canadas knowledge based and creative economy.
will make sure they keep knowledge and bio patents out of trade agreements.
aboriginal rights also a priority
responsible capitalism, not paternalist socialism.

and everyone gets a bike from the age of 9 and is told to ride it to work or school every day....

okay maybe the last one is a bit unrealistic.

oh I am late ...

I gotta go to a concert iron and wine tonight. Rather than watching the election results I am watching a whiny guy from georgia tell me about his wifes hibiscus.

June 22, 2004

Chapter 1: A long aside from the actual point of this entry

I find the hour right after waking up to be indescribably pleasurable for a couple of reasons. I am, relative to the rest of my day, calm and unengaged in anyones problems/issues save my own, and the mental traffic is light enough that I can spend some time taking pleasure in my physical activity - okay usually that just means making the bed or tidying up - and in ideas that can have absolutely nothing to do with what it is I actually have to do with my day. So I am kind of afraid to get any closer to having dependants( ie - kids). If I did have kids, then the important hour would either have to happen really early or stop altogether.)

Okay, so anyways this morning during important hour I was imagining a panel discussion that could take place at Concordias summer institute next year that would address issues of representing political diversity in the media. I can't be sure but I think I was having this thought because the CBC has been doing pretty much exclusive election coverage and I am not sure if I feel that they have been representing a fair picture of the Canadian electorate. Which is polite way of saying they obviously despise the Conservatives, which stands to reason, but do they need to make it so obvious? Besides Harper needs a chance to shoot himself in the foot. The CBC doesn't need to engage in clumsy satire to make the man look bad.

Chapter 2 : The Point

After this long rambling trip to an imaginary media conference and to criticize the ministry of truth. I found myself making the bed and thinking about smut and it's privileged existence on-line. That I was thinking of smut is primarily due to a convo I had with Mike (he of the squirrel discussion - and probably someone who I spend too much time citing on this blog) about child pornography, censorship and what kind of relationship there is between consumption of material related to the sexual exploitation of minors and the actual act of violation or molestation. We also discussed the idea that there is now a community or an entity around the pornographer that there may not have been prior to the establishment of communities of exchange and consumption of pornography online. Mike has written a very interesting entry about the subject here.
What I thought of this morning after chapter one, was that the one thing that has really enhanced the pornographers use of the internet probably as much as it's anonymity, is the fact that it is indexed and widely searchable.

A search engine has no inherent censoring capability. It can be set-up that way, but that's up to the end user, and not the designer/engineer at google who is deveoping the algorithms used to generate google results.

Which means, if I type in women + ponies. (okay don't laugh, okay laugh just a little. now stop) we all know I will get in descending order; "Equiworld : The Eriskay Pony", "A history of pit ponies", and an Ad for fisher price friendship ponies. But by page two it's beastiality all the way. If I put quotes around my search term I don't get anything but beastiality.
Here are the terms;

women + ponies

"women + ponies"

June 21, 2004

Okay, call me a bit of a survivalist but I spend maybe too much time wondering what will hapen to me when the world inevitably becomes an anarchic hell-pit à la Mad max, you know any day now, when the environment or a nuclear meltdown destroys us and all our wonderful infrastructure.

And I forget exactly how or why, but it came up during a phone converstaion with mike that perhaps squirrels, and the harvesting/ training/ development of .. could be my meal ticket when montreal gets it's rude awakening..

That's right everyone else'll be out scrambling, trying to beg buy borrow or steal food shelter clothing you name it, and I'll be hanging out with my squirrel elite squad, drinking some fresh and tasty squirrel milk, jetting about on my 500 squirrel-power skidoo.