July 6, 2006

Erratum

Thta first paragraph there was meant to be in blockquotes. it has just spent the past 12 hours out of blockquotes giving the world at large the totally incorrect impression that I am a writer of "The Guardian" calibre. I think this paragraph aptly proves otherwise. This morning I accidenty wrote my blockquote tag as "blcoqkuote". My humble apologies to the author of the following paragraph.

Also in case you were wondering, I did not write about the "conundrum of suicide bombers" last week. I never think in big words like that around these parts.

When I wrote in this column a few weeks ago about the conundrum of suicide-bombers, the eminent military historian Michael Howard dropped me a line to remind me that European soldiers had been sent into battle in the first world war with the message that there was no higher honour than to die for your country. Not to live, to fight, to kill for your country - to die for it. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. In this respect, conservative Americans are closer to the mental world of pre-1914 Europeans or ancient Romans than they are to that of most contemporary Europeans.

From:
Between cheese-eating surrender monkeys and fire-eating war junkies

I think The Canadian mentality falls somewhere between the barbarian Picts and secularized Jews of the the Turkish empire. How do you like them apples?

My new morning ritual involves sitting in front of the 'puter drinking coffee and reading the Guardian Blog which is called "Comment is Free". The footer of which reads, "..but facts are sacred".

Why is British media so smart!?

Get a Second-Life

Has anyone made that pun yet?

Second Life is on the CBC again, apparently morning radio is obssessed with the fact that you can make-money, live, and fall in love ( etc.. etc..) in this" virtual space". They can't get enough. This last interview was with some woman who used finances won through shrewd second-life dealings to divorce her husband and move out of the house - ostensibly, so she could play second-life unencumbered by the demands of a real and unsatisfactory relationship. She mentions how Second Life gave her the self-esteem to divorce her beau and get her life back - I am not sure which life she is talking about though.

The interviewers question - "why is this new form of living so incredibly attractive to people?" got me to thinking. What makes it so much more attractive to do/aqcuire all these things you can do in the real world, online? He said; "Maybe second life and spaces like it, are replacing our 'first-lives'".

I would hazard a guess, that the reason places like Second Life are so attractive is that they satisfy very difficult desires easily, and they do not reflect the reality of our environment or actual political conditions. For example the announcer made the comparison; "In Second-Life you can easily have a beach house, even if your character that never requires sleep and doesn't have a day-job to escape from, it's simple enough to acquire a beach house, so people do".

In real-time, beach houses are exhorbitantly priced, most people cannot afford a beach-house based on their real-time income. Add to that the fact that most waterfront property is totally over-developed or ruinously polluted and you have conditions of scarcity and political inequality that render the beach houses a dream, thus a second life reality for most people and a first life dissapointment.

Rather than addres the problems inherent in over-developed waterfront or consumer culture we're all going to switch out of meat-space and go to a place where real estate is virtual and there's an infinite number of robber barons waiting to make their fortunes.

It's not much of a solution to our problems is it?

More thoughts

And yeah I know most games are about wish-fulfillment, that's a given, and I am certainly not some horrifying utilitarian asshole that thinks all art and imagination should be in service to the revolution. Totally no. But I do find it funny that if you read Second-Life as an escape from burdensome reality. The most cherished escapes revolve around very common activities. Like shopping all the time and finding pants that actually fit you, or having lots of noncomittal sex with people dressed like Trent Reznor. It's bit distressing, it must mean our day-to-day lives are so far from satisfactory that we actually imagine better day-to day lives. IMHO fantasy, generally speaking, ought to have very little correlate to our own lives, that's why it's an escape, right?

It's the difference between Peter Pan and Pornography. Now you're all going to think I hate porn. I don't hate porn, but I hate fulfillment substitution. Fantasy should be it's own fulfillment - not a subsitute for a life you find wearying, or the fact that you aren't getting laid ahem... But sometimes one looks at porn when they are getting laid? Whatever, I leave writing posts about porn up to other people. I am still reading the juicy bits from 'Written on the Body' to get my kicks.

We're getting off topic, goodnight.

You know porn is probably the worst example ever because it serves so many function in society and being the lonely boy or girls panacea is really only one of them, (she says eyeing her well-worn copy of sexing the cherry).

I like the line about Peter Pan it stays.

June 27, 2006

I was looking for the snippet that clears a float and I found this instead on 43 things;

Have a clear hack policy

What is that? You ask. Well, according to Piotr Przemysław Karwasz:

I try to formulate a clear hack policy. Gaining informations about a system one can not avoid gaining information about people.

I love it when people pose quotidien ethical issues in public space. It renews my faith, both in hackers and the moral universe.

It also reminds me of the time Jane bought a used G4 and when we imported her bookmarks into Explorer we found the previous owners cached collection of porn site passwords.

Lucky!

June 11, 2006

They take them down to the river and put them in a canvas bag full of rocks. Then they tie the top of the bag to silence the mewling little kitties and chuck the whole mess into the swift clear waters.

Afterwards the silence is pierced only by birds and the scraping of pine needles in the breeze. One feels calm and strangely free of a burdensome responsibility that was all the less pleasant for it's helplessness.

That's what I'm about to do with my piece of merde Dell laptop.

I don't care about my clients, they can take their IE Windows experience and suck it up through a bendy straw.

This computer sucks. It has always sucked, and I hate it.

I just re-installed from the cd that CAME WITH MY COMPUTER and you know what was missing - the display driver - the network drivers - the audio and multimedia drivers - the smartcard drivers.

You know what saved my ass. The fucking usb port still worked and I actually remembered the name of my network card so I went and got the drivers ON MY MAC USING FIREFOX.

Well okay the wireless network drivers and the multimedia driver are still totally awol. But you know what? When I ran Windows Updater for the first time it said I only needed 4 new updates.

AS IF.

May 15, 2006

Totally wiped out. I don't know how people travel to these things. It's like going to a job interview with 400 people, and you're supposed to act like you are having fun.

Okay actually I did have fun, thanks mostly to Jason Diceman's hard work, the Boys of Bryght, and a small pitcher of g&t's.

Hey! I just figured out how to set up yet another online account so now you'll be able to see the dramatic pictures of firemen rescuing a suicidal mattress from the roof of Bookcity on Bloor. I like 'moblogging it's going to capture even more accurately than this blog the way I waste most of my days, and isn't that really what's at the heart of web 2.0?

Some serious reflections on camps and (un)conferences

- [all] Camps good, unconferences not so good.

- [friday] Camps should involve one outdoor moving component, because 8 hours spent on a single activitiy (in this case listening) is difficult for some people. At least those of us who skipped at least 2 periods a day in highschool and now work from home. I am used to focusing for longer than 8 hours only when I am involved in the production of material. By the end of the day I was like a little deflated hacky-sack of intelligence.

- [friday] It might be good to experiment next time with more intimate formats for discussions. Since there was a wide spectrum of familiarity with drupal between attendees it would have probably been beneficial to go into a buddy system. There could be a rotation so everyone gets to spend one hour with someone who knows more and one with someone who knows less. I firmly believe everyone has expertise to offer in some domain of web practise, so it's dis-ingenious to privelege just the people who know the code inside out. Besides putting everyones expectations for learning on only a few people means the experts don't spend as much time trying to learn stuff they may feel is lacking in their own repertoire.

In addition, I am not an expert but compared to a newbie I am. Why take someone who has an incredible amount of expertise and waste their skills explaining primary links? I can do that, someone who is new/not a coder really only needs the first level training to get started. So if we distribute responsability for learning in small groups peoples needs are better met.

- [saturday] Never have an unconference in a room with no sound-engineered wall coverings. I couldn't hear a thing, which limited my participation to a considerable extent.

- [saturday] If you are non-organizers of an un-conference don't introduce the whole thing while standing 7 feet higher than everyone else on two giant rolling step ladders. It looks kinda hyocritical to those of us who are senstive to the way event design can sometimes promote the status-quo. (See above comment for related issues).

- [saturday] When making up the schedule leave larger pieces of paper with more space for writing, if you are writing down a session describe the session a bit and describe who the intended audiance is. I felt like a rat leaving sessions that didn't interest me, if I had known in advance what the difficulty level or the main focus was, I wouldn't have had to creep away so often.

- [Bloghernorth] I like our session it was interactive as much as possible given the setting, and the discussion was interesting. It actually left me pondering what the point of all this tech/gender activity is in the long run. Is it getting more women involved in the technical/ social infrastructure of web communications as it exists now? Or is developing a way to critique technologies that impact everyone- not just women, from the inside so that they can begin to be less of a playground for people who already *get the metaphors and the reasons why*. and actually become useful tools for building long-term social change into the way people communicate with each other?

- [Bloghernorth] Of course really what I worry about is getting away from this notion that the raison d'etre of any gender based advocacy on Web2.0 is to get access to women as a market share. That's just not a goal I embrace or will ever embrace - which makes it tricky business negotiating these web2.0 sessions which are for the most part about building and selling bubble 2.0 technologies to the general public. It's like if I titled a session "gender politics for business" and taught gender sensitivy to marketers I'd be doing as much of a service as I sometimes feel making a gender specific conferences is doing. Which makes me sad.

- [Bloghernorth] The good news is that, Albert from bubbleshare added a second session titled designing software for women- quickly retitled "Designing software for novices" by Jen and Sandy that quickly turned from a discussion of "making apps so easy even your ditzy mother could use them" to how to design software that really responds to the needs of an end-user not the designer or the contraints of the programming environment. Okay I'll be the first to admit the one about moms sounds way better - but the discussion was great, and I like that it started the way it did..

Jen is sending me skyp-ey messages about work, and I am feeling my buzz starting to fade. Better get back to it.

tags = Torcamp, Drupalcamp, Bloghernorth

May 5, 2006

So in a whirlwind set of circumstances, I think I am heading back to my hometown for a slapdash week-end of, yeah, Drupalcamp and then BarcampTdot.

Frankly, the second one's a little intimidating. I was tooling around the Barcamp wiki and stumbled on the Pinko Marketing manifesto. I mean, it's not surprising, it seems like the natural evolution of Adbusters. You grow up, stop mocking the marketers, and then join them - bringing with you every counter-culture tool you can grab on your way out the door of your dingy former office.

I don't know, I was kind of hoping I could hang onto my ideals past the age of 30. I guess I'd have to go join Ruth in Whitehorse to do that, (and stop shopping at Simons).

Actually most of the projects I work on could use a decent pinko marketer. So hopefully I can reverse engineer the coopting of counterculture communication channels by bringing some useful tools home with me. It's like spy versus spy, you steal my style and I'll steal your methodology (back?).

What's weird is I have to remind myself that this is exactly what I want to research, so I have to stop positing an *us and them*, and look at all of this hype/merciless commercialization as simply grist for the little mill under my new haircut.

It's just not going to work that way, I can feel it. If I had a better head for quotes I would go find one about how research is never balanced or objective, and not just because of that over-applied scientific rule about observation changing that which is observed. Mostly because humans are subject to their feelings a lot more then they care to admit. It's not science, it's passion that's gonna fuck with my research. More like observation changes the person doing the observing, maybe I'll come home a marketing guru.

This is the biggest question right Alison? How do people working with technology, and social innovation find set of principals they can live with, when technology is probably the most commodified innovation available to the general public. I wonder at all my Pollyanna posturing. When it comes right down to it this is how I make a living, and maybe one of these days the fact that I have been riding the same bike for 7 years is going to get annoying.

(Note: I was listening to the Thermals and wrote the sentence, "working with 2.0 technology is like getting sprayed with the money-hose. The question is what sticks when your rub-down is finished." Then the Destiny's Child song Scrubs came on: "Can you pay my bills can you my telephone bills can you pay my automobiles.." and I mentally addressed my ideals with these questions, erased the money hose line and wrote what you just read above. Nothing like responding to a metaphysical question with some Beyonce. Okay but now it's switched to Arvo Part : Te deum, so perhaps I will have to erase this sentence and write about taking off to a monkery or whatever those places are called? )

Buh.. I have work to do, and I do in fact have a ticket to Whitehorse burning a hole in my pocket, maybe this time I just won't come back.

May 3, 2006

So my g4 is moving slowly t'ward the sweet hereafter and it's time for me to start strategizing a replacement while I still have the misplaced notion that I have money.

I spent this morning doing some small research. Here are my best two options. (Though I am willing to hear any other suggestions.) One is the low-end decision, the other is the high-end.

Please weigh in with suggestions, votes for, against, and/or offers of free high-end systems you want me to; "look after" for the duration of my MA free of charge.

Please bear in mind that I am not really a videographer or anything. Probably I will spend the next two years learning ROR and if I had half a brain I would actually start using Linux. BUT I make money making people pretty websites, and no matter how I try I cannot seem to make *pretty* on my Dell.

Anyways, these are my two ideas;

1/ LOW-END. Buy a dual boot( 1.67GHz) Mac mini and max out the ram so it will run Photoshop CS fast enough. Install XP and Tiger continue to use Dell laptop for travel until I have the money to sell it and buy a Macbook. PRICETAG $1100 up front and some applecare.

2/ HIGH-END. Lease a Macbook PRO dual boot (1.83ghz) right now, max out the ram and run both XP and Tiger (run linux inside tiger uh-huh I think it's called parallel). Sell present DELL laptop on McGill classifieds, use revenue from Laptop to pay out first part of lease over the year. PRICETAG $140/month ( + home insurance) =$160 over two years + applecare $300 -ish = $4140 but the home insurance + lease is a write-off in my business expenses. So that may bring the price back down to about $3000 or so at the end of the fiscal year? Except I will be back in school so I will also be writing off tuition /textbooks I don't know how much write-off room I can actually have..

Anyways, advice? please?

May 2, 2006

What to do now...

Do I update the site I am working on that is running 4.6 ??? Do I leave it. I am literally one semi -functional module away from launch.

buhh.... I knew this would happen.

April 6, 2006

"I know, I know! We'll make a conference about marketing web2.0!"

"Isn't it two years too late for that?"

"Whatever, it'll be amazing - just like it's in LA,

"...Only in Toronto"

"Don't be such a suck, we'll get a bunch of American panelists and pay them too much to say the same shit they've been saying stateside for years."

"and for Can-con we can get Andrew Coyne!"

"Awesome!"

I'll bet goddamn Anina has a panel too..

April 4, 2006

I need Delicious to start a branch for scholars called biblio.licio.us. I know it's a lot more awkward looking then plain old delicious but.

I realized this need following a lecture I just gave at Con U where we discussed what social software is actually good for. I think the common consensus is that SS is actually pretty bad for creating meaningful relationships, but it's great for sharing productive information.

For some people that's mp3 releases, or party information. For me, the soon-to-be academic who hasn't done a lick of research in 4 years, what would be immensely productive would be a shared bibliographic database. One that's based on URLs but includes all the other neccesary aca (I just realized that using aca as a short-hand for academic is probably cryptic. Aca= academic pronounced ACka as in ACKA ACKA shooting you with my pretend machine gun of brilliant wit) information ISBN, ALA, Author bios, summary or abstract + the usual Delli tags for searching so that when I need to research say; user_interface I can use other peoples annotated bibliographies as a starting point.

(...please please please...)

I know many scholarly works are part of dbases that are password protected, you can only get at them with your uni-library password so a few of the links would wind up dead, Google scholar already has that problem, I can deal.

What would make this nice and disruptive is that a University's domain is research and usually kind of secretive research. One person doing work around the cultural meaning of bobby pins for example, doesn't neccessarily want to share their references because that kind of cooperation isn't actually encouraged, I think it might be seen as threatening or something. But..by sharing our bibliographic references, scholars would be able to focus on actually creating new ideas and writing, instead of wasting all sorts of time re-inventing the wheel every time we need to research a topic.

Part of this is self-serving, I know already that my weakness as a scholar is going to be that part where experts say to wing-nutty idealogues; "Back it up!" and I won't want to. So let's all get together and make the "Back it up!" part of scholarly research just a wee bit easier so we can focus on writing clear conscise theses or doing excellent field work ; )

Unfortunately I am not a programming genius who sits around all day making social software, I am a wing-nutty ideologue who sometimes compares herself to a unicorn to make a point so...

So, could someone please do that for me? I don't want to have to do all my work alone in some vague library carrell I want other people who are doing similiar research to share their links with me (but in bibliographic format kapeesh so don't go telling me to repurpose delicious because it's scalable) I want ALA formatted bibilographic saving on an item by item basis with tagging just as in a normal delicious account.

Phewf I sure hope someone does that.

Other Stuff about Today

I just finished a great lecture in one of Owens other classes. The class is on the history of communications technology, my bit was on Social software. The interaction with the class was great, the discussion was smart and insightful, really an enjoyable experience. I did it a bit differently this time, I just went up there with a bunch of scribbled questions and asked them one after another, so I barely talked at all in the end just wrote a bunch of notes and made some very stupid jokes.

One big lesson I have come away with is this; People love to talk about the way they use technology. They do not like to talk about the technology itself (unless they are engineers) not how it's made, not why it was programmed that way, not what it's intended function was. They like to talk about themselves and their communities, and their experience of the technology. Also what they think that experience might imply for the world in general.

(I know this is old hat for my phd frends)

In comparison, trying to get a class full of undergrads excited about basic php/CSS is like trying to get them to collectively test drive an enema kit.

I find this disappointing. I like teaching how-to-do as well as how-to-think-about, but it looks like one domain is much more popular than the other.

Very Last Thing

This morning I was trying to update my hours on various projects and I realized I couldn't remember what I had done after I got home from the gym last Tuesday night. Then I realized I probably couldn't remember over 60% of what I did last week, except for the really fun stuff.

I think this means that either I am way too busy, or that my life is of so little consequence I am obliterating giant chunks of it to save server space (as it were), for what I don't know. Basically I think I need to get one of those improve your memory exercise kits, I can't keep externalizing everything, I practically have weekly amnesia.

March 31, 2006

My delicious is a mess.

I just looked under the tag Grrlstuff and found an article on Fundamental issues in OpenSource development. What makes that grrlstuff? Why it was written by a girl..

Apprently I am the organizational equivalent of a 90 pound weakling.

So here's the trade. I will do one of the following;

a/ make you a nice nice dinner with all the trimings
b/ style your blog
c/ give you a haircut
d/ draw your picture
e/ Pay you some money if that's really your bag.

If you'll borrow my delli password and re-organize some of my tags.. not all just the most blatantly stupid ones and make some tag groups perhaps.

I will finish the job, I just need someone with a keen eye for logical categories to impose some outer structure to my inner turmoil...

Let me know please, I promise it will be painless, and if organization is something you enjoy, you will have a field day with the outer manifestation of flink-mind.

xoxox (in advance)

January 18, 2006

web 3.0

I would right touch-ay but my blog engine won't support french characters.

Oh, and mr white eyes doesn't want me to fear a conservative majority.

It all comes down to accountability - if the cons aren't even willing to take responsability for the scope and impact of their ideologies on the campaign trail - how will the Canadian public get a straight answer from them in office?

This reminds me of the scene in little red riding hood where the wolf says, " the better to see you with " right before he says; " the better to eat you with."

January 5, 2006

via Full Circle Online

Web 2.0 and Communities of Practice conference

December 16, 2005

hmm.. so I was out with the dog and thinking about the whole Attentiontrust idea.

It reminded me of this conversation over at mks blog.

That one was all about what needs to be preserved. Attentiveness is different, but not by much.

What is being argued is the value of both information and attention. Take information add attention square the result or something, cuz you know I love math, and the end result looks a lot like taste.

Post-modernism is all about lack of taste, just like modernism had taste up the wazoo. The world wide web is a post modern phenom, so thus it's all about a lack of taste too, and more so now that anyone can publish anything without any editorial committee, jury, or even a spell check or two.

Which is why we're drowning in a sea of too much damn stuff and why other things; our attentiveness, our time, our willingness to care is in such short supply especially here, on the www. (For more about that go read Mediated yourself).

So in essence I agree, attentiveness as a commodity needs some really serious fostering, some encouraging, some stimulation. I want something I should pay attention to something worth my attention. But when I decide what's worth my attention that's when I am excercising my taste right?

I need to develop my attentiveness learn to appreciate things - and learn to focus my attention instead of skipping about like a waterbug on acid - that's just a product of my post-modern condition - it's a habit. It's not the medias fault it's how I learned to keep entertained. So in that respect I like the madate of Attentiontrust. It's my right to exercise my attention as I choose.

But, I am worried of this thing called Attentiontrust because it feels a lot like art school. To me anyways.

Oh my goodness.

I just applied to be a member of Attentiontrust. I imagine if they say no, than my blog really is as esoteric and disorganized as I think it is.

What's AttentionTrust?it seems to be an organzation that wishes to analyze, lobby for and protect peoples attentive real estate.

A postmodern response to information overload. Rather than choosing certain information to value they are asking the end-user to place value on their own attention.

This goes well with that mediated book I am slowly reading.

In fact it all sounds like a movement. Kind of like the Bauhaus where simplicity or "taste" was enforced as a response to an overload of social distemper or to a substantial lack of filtering. The Bauhaus a response to the aftermath of the first world war.

So what is a movement to validate peoples attention a response to - perhaps the culture of spectacle itself. Survivor the Life network Blogging etc..

The Bauhaus was also a response to the mechanization of production, by making simple furniture and simple machines the bauhaus were making it clear that their works were products of mechanization. At the time the prevailing mode of design (Edwardian) masked the means of its production behind faux craft finishes.

Maybe Attentiontrust istrying to make it more clear that we live in an information society - built as much on peoples powers of concentration and focus as the actual information being consumed.

To use the bauhaus model - A website could be covered in nifty flash widgets (the web equivalent of Edwardian florets) and still be boring as hell. It's value lies in the attention it gathers.

As a writer I feel a little sad not writing - "It's value lies in what is written therein".

But maybe that's the essential and kind of terrifying truth about web2.0 it's not what your writing at all. It's who is (how and how many too) reading it.

ps; in case you are wondering yes I did just draft any post that looked a little let's say - self -indulgent.

December 15, 2005

There's a title that owes a literary debt to spam.

And speaking of debt:

PayPal-ing International Development

Can you spare $25 bucks? Thanks to a new nonprofit, a few clicks of the mouse lets you loan it to a small business halfway across the world.

Maybe this could be one of Zephorias tithes?

After all my hemming and hawing about Web2.0 this is a really really *really * cool idea.

It's an interesting counterpoint to the 100 dollar laptop scheme. It's still using a technlogy to foster economic/social progress in the developing world. But it's not airdropping artifacts to create the conditions in which a certain kind of problem an be solved. It's using a technology-based service to help people establish feasible entrepreneurial models that are appropriate to their communities needs..

There should be a cheer for this but I am not that good at cheering since I am usually more the gadfly type.

Oh if you wanna become a first world loan shark to a small business in the south (Oops there's that gadfly again - bad gadfly down! we're on-side with this one... )

Here's the website;

http://www.kiva.org/businesses.php?sub=active

Each of the active businesses has a journal for it's owners to record their ideas and progress.

December 12, 2005

Ned just sent me this, to further compound the fear of web2.0.

Era of the Content Engineer

The fear striking quote;

"Because all this happens on-demand and in real-time, marketeers can put themselves directly in control of the effectiveness of their campaigns, says Schulman. "Marketing people are going to need to become more like content engineers. They're going to have to be responsible for the content." He sees this as the culmination of a long line of technology advances that have collapsed the content delivery chain, with marketing professionals moving from dictaphones to desktop publishing and finally to on-demand web publishing and editing."

As Ned so aptly describes it;

"And then yes, that's right, if this is true, web 2.0 is about replacing editors with content architects. Ugh. Gross gross gross."

I am beginning to really appreciate the need for *popular* (not just accessible) community based portals for content that is based on principals other than a sales-pitch.

December 6, 2005

Read this;

Forty Acres and a Mule: The Ruined Hope of Reconstruction

And then think about giving
cheap laptops to kids in developing nations

Okay what's the connection?

During reconstruction freed slaves were promised 40 acres and a mule. This land was parcelled out from abandoned plantations on the barrier islands of South Carolina and Georgia. St. Catherines Island was even turned into a separatist democracy - for a while.

See, none of it went over so well, because the problem was that massive institutional racism still existed pretty much everywhere else in the United States. Oh yeah, and eventually the plantation owners came home from Paris and wanted their land back.

So then what? Well the land was given back and all the former slaves became sharecroppers which was more or less a re-definition of slavery within a functional capitalist/democratic model.

How does this have to do with 100 laptops and the developing nations? The primary link is that in both cases a concrete object or objects, an artifact of a nascent capitalist system, was given as a subsititute for genuine reform.

I don't think it's a good idea in the present case scenario for the following reasons;

#1/ We are talking about economic sugffrage versus charity. Gift-giving has it's own power dynamics, and so I am not inclined to believe that giving the gift of technology is not without it's motives either of control and influence or eventual buy-back. For example telemarketing is a huge business in economically depressed areas. Maybe as we get closer to a fully functional information economy we are going to require entire regions devoted to doing the info economy equivalent of share-cropping (which is data-entry) at subsistence wages.

#2/ Gift-giving does not address the root causes of despair, anger and lack of choices. All parents know this. That's why I didn't get a pony when I was 12. To actually help developing nations the west should start making sustainable economic choices for long term global econcomic development. I don't think a wind-up laptop is going to do as much for global economic reform as say debt forgiveness or local economic development initiatives that present opportunities for home grown entrepreunerial activities. Real economic reform carries a higher level of risk but are in the long run offers a real future to developing nations.

#3/ Gift-giving as a form of distraction. We should fix ourselves and not try to give our neighbours something to take their minds off the fact that there is this sort of sick-in-the-head super-power with more wealth (okay and more debt ) and more guns then the rest of us all put together.

Rather than trying to bring the developing world with us into the western vision of the 21st century, the west could go in for some serious planetary talk therapy and try to understand the roots of post-modern imperialism and racism.

Instead, (in typical western fashion vis a relationship to developing nations which is more parent to child then a brotherhood of equals), we are gonna buy a really shiny toy for a bunch of kids who may or may not be treated like full participants in the global economy once they have learned to surf the internet.

Having said all that I am still more in favor of the idea than against. I just wish someone who dealt with issues of food security and public health could get the attention of some VC capitalists. Then we could have some tiny wind-up water purification units and maybe the generic drug producing pinball-machine/dispensary sent out along with the computers. Oh yeah and also a highly sensitive audio enabled mediator-bot, it wouldn't use the MSword translator to deal with regional dialects though, or else it would start more wars than it would stop.

Note: I decided to write this post so I could trackback to this post on misbehaving but its acting wonky - so consider this a hobbled little trackback.

November 22, 2005

I am reading "A Little History of English Gardens" by Jenny Uglow. In the chapter on Victorian gardening, Uglow describes the popularity of amateur florists associations and the role of the Royal Horticultural Society;

Meanwhile allotment clubs and benevolent societies tried in practical ways to improve the variety in a cottager's garden by providing free seeds, despite the wrath of the commercial seedsmen

****

Men tended their plants obsessively, dashing out to save them if a storm hit in the night and spending all their saving on special covers, frames, and carrying boxes. All through summer they took their blooms to shows across the country and the personal glory meant just as much as the silver cup, especially as they were reported in the gardening magazines.

In addition to the floral shows there were organizations like the Royal Horticultural Society, whose members were engaged in the organization, distribution and naming of plants, seeds and cutting brought over from the new world. Composed primaily of recognized botanists, the Royal Society was greatly helped by amateurs of all types; from nurserymen to retired country doctors, according to Uglow.

Gardens and flowers were accorded such great respect in Victorian England for a number of reasons. For one thing; plants were the closest most europe-bound englishman would come to the danger, excitement and possibility of the new world.

Gardening itself was given all sorts of beneficial properties. "It was a cure for depression, political agitation, drunkeness and ambition, keeping men off the streets and out of the pubs:" writes Uglow.

Now I am going to quote from a description of one of the first "hackers" clubs found in 1971. This description is taken from; "The Silicon Boys"

They tinkered, they talked technique, they had electronic show-and tell with their latest devices - it could just as well have been a guys poker night out, except that the cards had been replaced by gadgets. These "hackers" as many called themselves, were both industry professionals and obsessed amateurs, including a few teenagers...

Some Homebrewers preached politics, about how technology might foster community and democracy. Other talked of physics.

et al.

So, what am I trying to do, is draw some parallels between the Open Source movement and the public and cottage garden movement of Victorian England. Similarities include; Planned spaces, in which something needs to grow and hopefully to thrive, planned spaces that often come with a politics of progress - how technology or gardening is going to improve civil society.

Both cultures are brought to you by amateurs aided and abetted by largely democratic volunteer organizations.

Both have as their primary impetus, beyond the progress politics chit-chat the need to discover and to tame new and unexplored spaces, or species. Or in the case of Open Source to develop new systems or to take advantage of new possibilities in the realm of technology.

In either case it is a search for the new and the better. That made gardening so exciting in Victorian England and is what makes keeping on the bleeding edge of technological developments exciting for Open Source enthusiasts.

This needs more thought. obviously . Thanks Alison for the lunch time conversation that inspired this.

Oh and to leave you with the a word of caution about one of the gardens most infamous denizens;

A newcomer arrived to decorate the rockery. Around 1867 Sir Charles Isham of Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire brought some fashionable porcelain Gnomen- figuren from Germany. (One lone survivor from the original collection of twenty-one was discovered in a crevice in 1997, and reputedly insured for a million pounds.) Isham thought his gnomes were rather smart. So did many others; in 1906 Sir Frank Crisp had around a hundered in the 'subterranean passages and grottoes' of his stupendous alpine garden at Friar Park in Henley. Later, needless to say, the horticultural establishment turned up its nose: in the mid-1990s the writer James Bartholomew noted that they were banned from Chelsea Flower Show and quoted the RHS Article 15, which forbade 'highly coloured gnomes, fairies or any similiar creatures, actual or mythical for use as garden ornaments'. It makes no difference; toadstools, red hats and all, the gnomes are here to stay.

Actual or mythical? "...no I swear sir, that's not a gnome. It's a life-like sculpture of my incredibly short round friend, sitting on a toadstool, smoking a wee little pipe. Please don't make me remove it, I beg you!"

Question: What is the OS equivalent of garden gnome - ?

November 18, 2005

Scary Economics

And so, having gone on for so long, I at long last come to my point. The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die. The same thing happens when blogs and other free on-line content go up against old-fashioned newspapers and magazines. Of course the mainstream media sees the blogosphere as a competitor. It is a competitor. And, given the economics of the competition, it may well turn out to be a superior competitor. The layoffs we've recently seen at major newspapers may just be the beginning, and those layoffs should be cause not for self-satisfied snickering but for despair. Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.

In "We Are the Web," Kelly writes that "because of the ease of creation and dissemination, online culture is the culture." I hope he's wrong, but I fear he's right - or will come to be right.

Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It's a set of technologies - a machine, not a Machine - that alters the forms and economics of production and consumption. It doesn't care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn't care whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. It doesn't care whether it burnishes our culture or dulls it. It doesn't care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let's can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.

Excerpted from : The amorality of Web 2.0 by Nicholas Carr

Something to think about - the whole article is worth a couple of thinks. If you tend to wax philosophical about technology.

I am doing so under the gun while I work on MA applications - and then wonder if I should go back and do a bachelors in science instead and become a zoologist. No one is ever going to hype eco-system 2.0, we can't even stop clusterfucking eco-system 1.0.

Okay mir go read. support yourself. make hot chocolate. do not be negative.

October 21, 2005

Via Geeked

Bubble 2.0: Please God Just one more bubble.

That should keep you inveterate optimists on your toes for while.

October 15, 2005

Finally got around to downloading voodoopad

From the site :

What is it?

VoodooPad is a new kind of notepad. It's like having your own digital junk drawer where you can jot down notes, web addresses, to-do lists... Anything on your mind. VoodooPad automatically links each page together, to form a miniature world wide web, on your desktop! Anybody familiar with the WikiWikiWeb will feel right at home with VoodooPad.

Type in your notes, and highlight important words or phrases to create new pages; or drag and drop folders, images, applications, or URLs into VoodooPad - they're linked up whenever the word representing it is found.

VoodooPad 2.1 Features:

* Category / Tag support: Assign and browse categories to pages in your documents.
* Spotlight: Search the contents of your VoodooPad documents via Spotlight.
* Inter-document links: Link to a specific page in another VoodooPad document.
* Sketch: Feeling artistic? Bring down the Sketch sheet and draw what you can't express in words.
* Auto-Bullets: Make lists and outlines with a couple of key commands.
* Saved Workspaces: Quit with all your windows open. Relaunch, and there they are again. Great for picking up where you left off.
* Encryption: Securely encrypt pages in your document.
* Backlinks: Find out what pages link to the current page.
* New Search: Search through multiple open documents at one time.
* AppleScript: Improved AppleScript support, including changing the contents of any page from AppleScript.
* AddressBook Integration: The names of people in your AddressBook become links you can act on.
* Rename pages: Do you not like the title you gave a page? No problem, in VoodooPad 2.0 you can now rename it.
* Improved URL and email address markup: VoodooPad got some new smarts to help it figure out what exactly is an url or not.
* Threaded exporting: VoodooPad will take those tasks and put them in the background so you can keep on working in your pages without being interrupted.

Wahoo... (ahem) It's only for mac.. Thanks jen, I am gonna have fun not using memos anymore.

October 8, 2005

Finally.

And it's the new distro called badger something er' other. Which means that it compressed XP and put it on a separate partition without losing any data and now I can use lappy the lap-top , now named Lola after the dog for testing yes, but I can also play dozens of weird-ass linux games like "Robot" where a little guy stands uselessly in a field of robots until one comes along and munches him and he scream "AAAARGGH" and dies.

Maybe there's another way to play "Robot" but I prefer to think of it as a game that makes a sport of inevitability.

I had a friend who is a sys-admin come over and in this totally gender-typical way I made dinner (not a very good dinner- sorry) and he brought the new disk image and his terminal window chops.

Which were completely unneccessary for the Ubuntu install. I could have done that with one arm tied behind my back while stirring the curry.

But, we also (okay he mostly) formatted my external hard drive so it can be read by all three operating systems (huttah!).

Then sys-admin pointed out that the guy who is always on his computer in the window across from my apartment is using my wifi signal like a bandit. Then sys-admin (would he be mad if I referred to him as syssy I wonder?) did all sort os sneaky stuff with the terminal so we could see that neighbour is using gnutella to file share on my bandwidth - the nerve. That's like letting your trees roots grow under someone elses garage or something. Okay it's not really, but whatever. Where's the neighbourly attitude thats what I wanna know.

And then I guess purely for amusements sake we turned the router on and off and then on again just so we could stand in the darkened window and watch the neighbour get up and shake his head and check his computer and look annoyed etc..

The question is, do I leave him a note saying: "Thanks for sharing, now how 'bout you slide me ten bucks a month for all those movies you're getting." Or do I pretend we live in a free country and let him continue.

*Or* do I do what evan would says I should do and add a password to the network?

These are the pressing issue's of the day. And what kind of picture should I put on my new desktop ?

September 29, 2005

The $100 laptop moves closer to reality

From Ned...

How cool is that? Now my plans for starting tech empowerment course for kids run froma suitcase is only two years away from beng totally affordable.

It's raining out. My plan to post once a week is an obvious failure.

oh yeah!!

Erin if you are reading this i have a business meeting in Ottawa this week-end so we should hook -up and go look at enigma machines etc.. my msn is wussmachine@hotmail.com. messenger me.. or send me an email.

Housebreakers if you are reading this.. the only peice of technology I own is my 5 year old g4 which makes burpy farty scray noises whenever it tries to do anything as complex as open a new browser window. DO you yorselves a favor and don't bother robbing me, there's no point

September 14, 2005

How much do you know???

Quiz: More fun with open source

September 7, 2005

So I have finally realized that all my traipsing around in the verdant valleys of textpattern/drupal mean that I am a horrible lazy person who has pretty much forgotten everything she once knew about hand-coding.

(It's kind of like lace embroidery to me at this point, a valuable skill to be sure, but not one I am neccessarily very interested in.)

Yikes, except I have this one site I need to work on that I made back in the day, and it's this cobbled together weirdness and none of it obeys any coherent logic (of course it doesn't, I made it..).

And now they want an archive and I can't figure out how to pull things fom my calendar database and display them as a linked list of events according to their months, (something stupid dumb textpattern would do in a second... I have become fat and lazy off the sweat of others. I feel such a deep sense of shame.)

..and I have just spent a couple of nerve-crushing hours sitting in front of my computer and we are both cranky and shitty. BUt over-all happy because it's been ahappy kind of year so far if I could just do this one thing and then move on to better and funner things to do.

The point is; I would like to offer some person out ther who in infinietly better at coding then me, an oportunity to win an awesome dinner some wine/beer and a free piece of art. that's right a print of your choice in exchange for some really basic php help.

Of course the killer is that I will be in Toronto all week-end and this was suppose to be done for uh, tomorrow. So I will have to be on MSN with whoever it is tomorrow evening and friday during the day.

Eric??? I know you are not busy at all doing full time classes and all that. This will be fun, and probably it will literally take you about 15 minutes to figure it all out.

I would of course just email Eric myself and keep all this nasty begging to myself but who lost Erics email. oh that's right. It's me.

********

Update: I might have found Erics email.

Disregard this whole post. I am only leaving it up as a text-based hair shirt I will have to wear until I manage to get myself out of this foolishness.

September 6, 2005

Why Web2.0 Matters: Preparing for Glocalization

Danah writing about web2.0. The first thing that comes to mind is that old saw from art school; "The personal is political."

Not because of any particular tie-in but because it is the post-modern condition to take massive systems and attempt to make them person-sized and not only comprehensible but meaningful.

{break}

Someone just interrupted this *fantastic piece of intellectual inquiry* with a frightening/funny/weird story about technology. I can't wait until they blog it.

It's too late for this, my eyes are glue-y. I am going to sleep.

tags: Glocalization

August 24, 2005

yep

okay, okay...

I am thinking of the veda hille song;

Where am I from

Every cloud has a silver lining
It isn't true
where I am from
every cloud has another one behind
and then there's you
with whom I curl so well
where am I from?
the past it fades I find..

Into each life must fall some rain,
now that is true
where I am from
you love the rain or move away
which i didn't do
I love the rain where I am from

.....every chord has a silver-lining.

which is really a lot worse than I feel.

I rebuilt all my partitions this morning to try and give deskie a little TLC and somehow that erased my i-tunes playlist information and the database file that had stored the music. The music is still there I just had to go find the folder and re-import the works, but all my playlists are gone, including one called OUI which was exactly that.

Of course this feeling of thwarted memory is really not just about play-lists of course not. Playlists and the songs that occupy them are an exceelent metaphor for the days and the months the one listens to a certain set of songs, and the reasons why, and the people you gave certain songs to, and the reasons why.

Bad subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life is looking for submissions for their intermedia issue.

Too bad the deadline is September 1st. So only those ofyou with actual papers ready and waiting at the gates are gonna make that. I have a paper but it's still only at the; think-about-the-fabulous- reception-said-paper-will-recieve-in-a-really-swell-auditorium-as-a-way-of-
putting-myself-to-sleep" stage.

No comments about how many of my ideas never make it out of that stage please, a''ight?

My categories are totally dumb. They make no sense.

August 17, 2005

I know I should be learning Drupal because it's important.

And I will, I swear.

But I SO love textpattern

Especially conditional tags and plug-ins today.

Here's a metaphor that Neil Stephenson would appreciate;

I like bikes more than cars. They are quick and handy and negotiate space (bikelanestrafficjamssidsewalksonewaystreets), distance (thestoretheparkthebarcampinggroceries) and time(onehouroneday10minutes) with a minimum of fuss and with a decent enough amount of efficiency to be a serious urban vehicle for many people.

In fact, and this is a total non-sequitor. Yesterday Lauren biked home with her room-mates recently deceased guinea pig in her purse, and Niki on the very same day biked to the very same home with her very much alive cate Kujo strapped into a cat bag slung across her back.

So bikes are not only useful, they can double as multi-passenger transport vehicles, and hearses. (hearsei?)

What's my point, (oh yes.. I do have one). My point is that in the grand scheme of things bikes are tiny, little metal sticks soldered together to hold up a couple of wheels. Bikes are chassis with seats, they are nothing.

But they work so well.. So why would I trade in my bike for some giant complex car? It's going to do a relatively poor job of conquering space and time, compared to my trusty Joe Breeze, So up to now, I have managed to stay on two wheels.

Voila, Textpattern same issue. It's so good, why would I want anything heavier? Although Jen swears there are fun times to be had over in drupal -land.

And I did wish I had a license when