Internet culture
If Xeni Jardin were to inteview me..
If Xeni Jardin, boingboing.net entryista and Bruce Sterling abductatrix (see BB archives) were to come over to my apartment and interview me I would ask her to:
Help line up my frames, cuz i can never get it right on my own Offer her some Thin Mints, they’re tastier after midnight Ask her about all the variegated tribal languages she has learned Tech.fame has not yet come my way though.
Quick thought..
Xeni Jardin writes for BoingBoing.
X is a short form of “christ” like “christ-mas”
Thus
Christeni…Christ e…n…i.
ine is the reverse
Christ + ine
Is this all a clever abbreviation and anagramization of her name?
Clever in any case.
Living the cyber.chic life
Premium coffee, premium water, Heathrow airport, quicksilver cool Powerbook, t-mobile hotspot, the stone roses shaking out of the Virgin megastore express, the beautiful attendants in their full length fashionable uniform covering coats, the Russian girl with pretty eyes, ringed in jetlag black, her mascara melting ever so slightly, with the ornate flower painting in glitter and white on her fingernails.
That’s entertainment.
That’s Heathrow. That’s my last half hour in England.
My flight just came up on the board, time to head on down to the gate.
The mysterious lore of Linux Chicks
It has been long rumoured that there are beautiful computer savvy chicks in the wild.
Well Mutual of Omaha hasn’t quite presented a comprehensive 48 minutes of such facts and I’ve only recently encountered one meself (pr0pz to Leigh, fast on the trail of her quarry, C#).
But when reality fails, what can’t Photoshop give us (WARNING: Possible ‘artistic nudity’ [ Europeans and Californians won’t be shocked ])?
Or if you prefer a less OS-biased and ASCII artistic feat.
Something inspiring
[Open Source software like Linux was just the beginning.
Open source textbooks have been written, open source architecture, and now Open Source Textbooks. Why not.
Remember some of those textbooks you read where you were like “hey this bozo doesn’t know anything!”. When people who write for interest not profit will make things much better.
When the internet depends too much on one technology
Dangerous things happen.
Can you get anything done in the day, as a technical professional, without google? It’s pretty hard.
Well today someone decided to DNS hijack google and yahoo. Check out what they did to google’s DNS record:
Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net for detailed information.
GOOGLE.COM.SUCKS.FIND.CRACKZ.WITH.SEARCH.[DELETED].COM GOOGLE.COM.HAS.LESS.FREE.PORN.IN.ITS.SEARCH.ENGINE.THAN.[DELETED].COM GOOGLE.COM
I put DELETED in there so as to restrain any benefit to the hijackers.
This is the danger of monocultures. This is why monopolies must be carefully watched, less their tendency to groupthink make them, and by extension us, incapacitated by a core attack.
Computer Scientists versus Everyone Else
Often hereabouts I am asked if my degree is in CompSci.
HELL NO
Computer Scientists are endlessly fascinated by optimization, IT guys (of which I number) are concerned with “can it even fsking be done?” IT guys do not care about memory usage, unless it makes things not work. CompSci guys don’t care about doing things merely, they want to do it in the most efficient manner possible (left to their own devices).
Case in point, CompSci guys find pages like this endlessly fascinating. Myself, I was ready to move back to
If you want to have a successful tech company in the future..
You must understand the power of a creative workplace and basing your workplace in a creative epicentre (hint, most of them were blue shaded in the last election…)
For those of you not yet done with Mom Tech support season for the year
Helpful hints here
My sickening fascination with Paul Graham’s work
Graham has just published “Return of the Mac” [ LINK ] in which he describes how the leading technologists (in his parlance, “Great Hackers”) are switching over to the Mac / OS X in droves.
Whoever is doing marketing at Burger King understand viral marketing
This ad’s (“Subservient Chicken”) discussion is spreading like wildfire all for the BK chicken something burger.
Check out this deconstruction.
The psychology of rate-me sites
The BigHoeSmacka and I were discussing why it is that the average on the ‘rate the girls’ feature of AOL instant messenger comes out so much lower than the average rating on sites like hotornot.com.
For those of you unfamiliar, it works like this. Picture of ratee pops up, you click on rating 1-10, average presented on the next picture.
An attractive girl on AOL comes out on 7.0 on average whereas an attractive girl on hotornot.com comes out near the 10 mark. So what’s going on here? The fodder on both sites comes out roughly the same, amateur photography, non-professional lighting – the culprit has to be something psychological in the raters.
Can’t we all just get along? vi vs. emacs
For many years I have been an emacs editor user and have scoffed (loudly, with spittle) in the general direction of vi users.
Well this weekend whilst on call I took the opportunity to learn the vim editor. ‘vi’ was my first unix editor (as it is for most people) and I’m now in a position to appreciate vim’s elegance and approach. It’s not emacs, but it’s not a hunk of junk.
Emacs v. vi is rooted in the love of Lisp
In the unix / linux world ( and thus, by extension the Mac OS X universe as well ) there is much to-do made about the choice of text editors.
Why Does It Matter Much of the configuration of these various systems is centered around the generation / manipulation of text-based configuration files.
For example, if you’re on windows and you want to change your timezone you must go to Start Button / Control Panel / Time and Date / Timezone. On Unix / Linux / Mac OSX you simply edit a text file, change the word from PST to CDT ( or what have you ) save the file and you’re done.
A happy day to us, my Bretheren
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Guild:
Hooray for us! It’s SysAdmin Day.
Whether you be a Unix admin with fleet fingers stringing together pipes and greps with a smattering of sed for spice….
Be you an NT admin, breaking the mouse’s right button….
Be you a VAX admin, lost in some ancient legacy system….
Be you a PBX admin with uppity people telling you how important their voice mail is….
Be you a calendaring admin of a crappy, non-scaling, legacy application (m**eland….
Today is a day to know that we all know the same trials and tribulations: the uppity user who knows mare about your job than you do (apparently), the uppity admin who wants you to know that her use of application X is more important than everyone else’s use of application X and you should fix it for her first, the uppity PHB who suggests that using Java makes more sense here….
Mice visits the recent Internet Past
About 2000 my roommate The Dogg came running into my room and told me I just had to check out this guy “Mahir”. Mahir was one of the earliest WWW celebrities. His page, in a broken language approximating English, invited ladies the world over to his home in Izmir where dancing, conversation, and joviality would be assured.
An archived history of Mahir can be found, uhm, here.
Mice, intrepid internaut, has done a favor for our studied Smyrnian man-about-town, he has re-edited his page to communicate the beauty within Mahir that may not have been immediately evident from his original sentence use.
Flying through Melbotisland
The League of Melbotis lives in AZ.
I flew through Phoenix’s Sky Harbor about 1:30 p.m. the other Friday.
Damn, it is HOT there. I do mean HOT. Sitting in a tin can on the tarmac while waiting to hit the jetway was an exercise in pretending to be a baked potato.
How is it that he can live there?
Wisdom comes from IBM
“All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can’t get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer.” – IBM maintenance manual (1925)
Mysteries of the high-tech work environment...
I’m always baffled by people who e-mail me who open with a salutation - but misspell my name.
I simply don’t get it.
First, I think that a salutation in email is rather antiquated. It heralds from a time when people got each others’ mail, it bespeaks an era of honorifics and senseless keystrokes. Further my name and address are up in the to field, I know who I am, you know who I am. Case closed.
Nevertheless, people still like to use it in email, or so I’ve noticed, when they are either
Asking for something and they got your name as a back-channel to do the magic minus the bureaucracy
The secretly subversive Wikipedia mail of the day
I subscribe to the Wikipedia daily article mailing list. It has an article of the day, several articles for events in history on this day, and then ends with a wikiquote.
Given the theme of my recent posts, I thought this Wikiquote was appropriate:
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.” – Galileo Galilei
Steven: Secret Survey Subversive (and sibilant)
In my job as IT demigod, petitioners unto My Grace open “Cases” where they ask for “Help.”
Like a good Deist Deity I frequently look upon these “pleas” with disdain and go on about other things like imagining what the perfect color of yo-yo is.
Unlike a true deity, however, the petitioners unto my favors are invited to fill out satisfaction surveys.
This does not work so well in the real world. Rating a deity on His or Her success in fulfilling your request for miraculous intervention generally has bad side effects varying from Elk-Turnings-Into, Wanderings-Until-Messiah’s-Return, and the classic lightning bolt.
Please, let us retire LOL
At Geekfoolery.com the authors have noted that “LOL” as an acronym has undermined effective IM communication of amusement.
Some things are truly LOL moments: Most things that The Social Bobcat writes fall into this category ( e.g. this very old post of mine ).
Most things are not of this calibre, but a great many people use the LOL acronym to assert that what was said was of this uproarious nature. The Geekfoolery krewe sugest using BNS. Sure it’s a bit, uh, graphic, but after a few months of use, the acronym will take over the component and all we will have two meaningful acronyms for conveying mirth: mere amusement and uproarious hilarity.
The Art of Dating A Developer Part I: Twitch Mode
In effort to contribute something to the internet community more substantial than my musings on music, people in the environment, and a laundry list of “what I did today”, I have decided to undertake ( perhaps ) a series of writings about living with the technology-minded partner. Today I will write on what I have come to call “twitch mode”: what it is, how it affects relationships, and how you and your partner can handle its presence.
Your guy can’t focus on you, your attention is distracted after a day hard at work, everything feels too slow, after juggling chainsaws all day you feel like you’re can’t be involved at home?
Steven: Once un-helpful to Linux n00bs
I found a chat transcript I saved from IRC circa 1999.
In it a young n00b called “Operator” asks some very rudimentary questions ("what’s telnet?"). Ultimately we point him in the right direction, but there’s some good laughs had along the way - especially when we invite him to visit Murray’s testing machine (127.0.0.1). He’s hesitant, but eventually he starts to ping Murrays’ machine.
Attending the Web 2.0 Conference, Boston MA
Hello to anyone and everyone out there.
If, by some chance, you took a look at my ridiculous looking name-badge and decided to punch my name into Google and wound up here, hi, how are you.
Day 1 My morning sesion was excellent. Michael Sampson lead a session on what the skillset for a manager in a post-2.0 world would look like. The session was very exciting. Michael did an expert job of delivering slides that framed break-out mini-sessions among attendees. I very much enjoyed this meet-up. Michael seems to have enjoyed giving the presentation as well.
Thanks to all my fellow break-out group friends.
Tuesday night in Boston
Tuesday night was a lot of fun in Boston. After doing the full conference raft of activities we retired back to our respective rooms for some decompression and rest.
Around 6 we headed into the borderlands to Chinatown and enjoyed a steak dinner at Smith and Wollensky. I enjoyed a bowl of their “world famous” split-pea soup and, quite possibly, the best steak I have ever had.
It was a bone-in ribeye that just knocked my socks off. I was cutting it very thinly and making my own carpaccio style cuts. It was delicious.
The restaurant was in an old armory building near Chinatown that was decorated in a very nice early-teens, Teddy Roosvelt, 48 stars kind of way.
Thinking about news aggregation sites
My first news aggregation site was memepool.com. This site was basically a sporadically updated blog that had “good” links. Like most people of the era, I had been getting URL’s in the mail for a great number of years already, but in 2001 when I encountered this site, the standard for quality and range of links was sufficiently raised.
Let me also introduce a third axis called freshness that could be added which measures the frequency of update. These will be the elements in our three dimensional grid of considerations.
Freshness Range Quality Notably, the latter two axes are much more subjective ( last post can be measured ).
Leo LaPorte: Tune in, turn on, TWiT out
I was listening to MacBreak Weekly episode 54 where LaPorte and Merlin Mann are discussing the finer points of The Big Lebowski and cite that Bridges never once actually “imbibed” Lebowski’s preferred intoxicants while acting.
He said you just have to fake it or else you can’t work.
Leo then revealed he used to get high on hallucinogens and do radio show ( about the 3 minute mark ).
The Screen Savers Leo?
No, I will not be using Facebook
No, Marvin K. Mooney I will not Facebook
I will not use it to meet a cook
I would rather go to a bar
I would rather drive in my car
I’d rather return things at Fry’s than
read others’ ego-lies.
Please do not search for me there
for it I simply give no care.
More About Facebook’s Invasive Terms of Service
Procrasti-studying: Yak Shaving by another name
Some people, when reviewing for Latin finals pull out a legal pad and a few sharp pencils and then happily go about their day.
Others write a LaTeX guide to:
Forming the Subjunctive Subjunctive Uses And post them on the internet…
I mean, GOSH, how anyone study without these charts being beautifully typeset via LaTeX? Lauren remarked that she didn’t know my Latin class had a LaTeX-formatting component.
New Internet Jargon: Banality Inertia
It’s a familiar way of structuring an idea on the internet, especially as presented in blogs:
The world seems to have some condition
Now, portion the first are pro-SKUB, but portion the second people are anti-SKUB.
pro-SKUB arguments are lain anti-SKUB arguments are lain
Now a commenter comes along and, being a fair-minded type, can only come to the conclusion that surely some Hegellian synthesis of the two camps is sensible.
He begins typing this out and then thinks: “By Odin’s Raven, this is clearly the most banal thing I’ve ever written: everyone knows that pro-SKUB is sensible in some ways and anti-SKUB carries the day in others”.
Tw00t
Against much better judgment Lauren has explained that she does not any longer want to be my API for interfacing with Twitter:
Steven: Hey did you know Lambie is in the panel picker for SXSW
Lauren: Yes. He sent a twitter note about it….etc.
Today I join, under a great curmudgeonly cloud. Upside, I’ll be much more in the know about parties during SXSW, so, yay.
Minnesota is full of win
The epic “West St. Paul.”
Inbox Zero
I’m very happy to report that I have put my inboxes ( Personal1, Personal2, GMail, etc. to 0 messages). I believe that an empty inbox is a key to sanity, especially for those who live and die by the e-mail sword.
For anything that comes in any inbox I either:
Reply / take an action Delete it Archive it for reference With just these simple three techniques and a few extra folders on my hard disk, I was able to empty all the existing mail in my inbox.
Now, I will certainly get more mail in the future, so how am I going to handle it?
Speaking of Grand Yak Shaves
Donald Knuth started writing The Art of Computer Programming and along the way decided that technical publishers didn’t know what they were doing. Knuth’s yak-shave?
Writing TeX: A 10 year yak shave that has produced the most elegant typesetting language ever.
A fabulous link between the science of this book, art, and symbolic systems: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4532247
Unlikely Phrases in the Recording:
Bar Coding Arabic Language Algebra Samuel Johnson Betsy Ross God
A Different Vision of AI
NPR recently shared Erik Baard’s suggestion of why humans ought, and perhaps are morally obligated to, develop Artificial Intelligence.
Traditionally AI opinions are predictable. Either “bots run amok (possibly enslaving humanity, determining us a parasite, rendering all matter indistinct, or generically squashing our free will and giving us a life that we consider less human)” or “bots are our salvation: they will help us, we will become them, or they will optimize humanity’s place on Earth benevolently.”
Baard makes an interesting supposition, the ecological fate of the Earth is sealed: we will exhaust the resources on this planet in a finite measure of time.
Book Review: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
Introduction I recently read The Shallows and found it greatly enlightening. I plan on doing a series of posts on the topic of this book. My first post will be a basic synopsis.
Synopsis Nicholas Carr’s argument in “The Shallows” is beautiful in its simplicity.
The human brain exhibits a property called neuroplasticity that endures through all stages of life. Therefore the mind’s physical structures are always mutable What we do, which tools we use to express thought, and how we think fosters or inhibits focus in our minds and alters the quality of the thoughts themselves.1 This is not merely a style of thinking change, but an actual change in the neural structures, per 1.
The Personal Side of "The Shallows"
While Carr’s book, as I outlined in my previous post seems to follow a neutral, logical character, the book is also intensely personal. Carr himself starts the narrative not as a dispassionate researcher asking whether the neuro-anatomical structures of the brain are changing due to prolonged Net exposure. Carr begins, in Chapter 1, with a gut-feeling: “Why can’t I pay attention like I used to?”
For me this was very telling because I’ve been afraid to admit to myself that my mind has been changing over these last few years and that I’m not entirely sure it has been for the better.
Reading "The Shallows:" Virality
Virality Previously I wrote about the mens nova, the new mind, and how, for some it is being programmed and encouraged by our peers and our workplace. It would seem that the mens nova should be localized among certain work disciplines or economically advantageous countries and age groups.
But it is not. As the elder generation dies away, the population will come to be dominated by those who understand and take as granted the mens nova. Further, the older and less digitally entrenched are not immune. Parents will be seduced by text messages, smaller, more frequent, offering status insights on a faster basis.
What’s Wrong with Me (Us?): The Shallows
Why are we so quick to bore, why are we so needful of new input? Why is the need for new information so recognizably similar to the need for a cigarette?
The conclusion that presents itself is unpleasant and simple. Our minds have changed to want more events of this type. “But how did I change my mind, I did no drug, I was not brainwashed.” Ah, but you were. You stood by, beguiled by the story of a lying Greek and didn’t realize that Troy was being sacked of its gold behind your back all the while you stood by, begging for more of the fabulist’s tale.
Recommendations I’m Pondering: "The Shallows" Cont’d
Cultivate idleness. Each time you’re not doing anything try to enjoy it. Don’t open BookFace mobile on the iPhone. Don’t open Twitter mobile. Manage your ingress points: don’t open the aggregator site and let its promise distract you Work in discrete units of time during which you turn off the information drug sites: Facebook, Digg, Reddit. A tool that sets 40 minute work sessions per hour (See: Pomodoro Method) that also blocks your most distracting sites might exist
Notes from "The Shallows"
De scriptibus meis:
Content seduces us (good, ill, pornographic) while the delivery mechanism re-patterns our thinking process. That is we can’t think about idea acquisition, as moderns, without “book.” We can’t think of “a day” without a notion of a measured, external reality that is divided into 246060 measured by the rattle of a cesium atom
Prologue McLuhan: “The content of a medium is ’the juice piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind’(Carr, 4).”
Consider: Maxim that “content is king” heard at SXSW and other conferences. We celebrate the content which has been “the same for every new informational medium going back at least to the books that came off Gutenberg’s press.
Changing the rhetoric: post-PC Era
Two weeks ago I noted that at the Apple Keynote Jobs had put forth an interesting display of rhetorical jiujitsu: repeatedly referring to now, i.e. the current moment for a sale, as “the post-PC era.” Thus far I hadn’t seen a lot of commentary about the injection of this meme, but I see it now in the incipient stages of taking hold.
Time magazine’s Harry McCracken’s article of March 10th bears the title: The Post-PC Era Is Already Here. McCracken’s article is more a “mention” than a “use” insofar as refers repreatedly to the introduction of this term by Jobs, but I believe Time’s editorial board is positioning and helping introduce this meme into a wider circle.
I, too, am glad I did not come of age in the age of the internets
I think Ryan and I must be on a similar wavelength lately as I too was thinking the exact same thing as him: I am thankful to not have come of age in an era where the internet’s depthless hard drives could store my equally depthless teenage narcissism or youthful folly for-ever.
As an early (may I say that?) adopter in the general populace (1994, dial up Unix shell on a SCO-V UNIX) of the Internet, I didn’t get off scot-free. Thanks to BBS’ and Usenet, I managed to write some pretty inane things (e.g. “Are you excited about Mike Modano and the Dallas Stars?
Hipchat!
Earlier this year when driving back to the City from San Jose, I saw this billboard featuring “Y U NO Guy” advertising a service called Hipchat.
Today on my first day at Carbon Five, I got registered for my accounts: email, tracker, etc. And of course:
I USE HIPCHAT, Y U NO GUY.
Hipchat’s founder, Pete, tells the story of Hipchat aweseomeness here.
Blogging with Vim
I have been wanting to get the Vim Editor working as a tool for blogging. I’d discussed this a time or two with my friend Daniel Miessler, and he brought up a critical thing that was missing for him in migrating away from Textmate: the ability to do an “I’m feeling lucky” hotlink onto a word as one is composing.
I had to admit, this was a pretty compelling feature provided by Textmate’s “Hyperlink Helper” bundle. Its lack definitely hindered my drive to blog in vim.
To that end, I have created my first Vim plugin and port this sexy capability to Vim.
Spring Break and Tech Conferences
What is it about tech conferences that makes individuals who work in a highly cerebral and reflective industry like software development go quite so nuts? Why the oral sex jokes, the thong-model backgrounds on slides, etc.? And why are the sponsors so willing to bring out Hooters girls or hire go-go dancers at their events?[1] In short, why does the tech conference misbehavior look so much like the hormonal, puerile misbehavior associated with Spring Break misbehavior? I believe that a contributing force rarely mentioned is the way conventions and their host cities (intentionally or not, tacitly or not) market the host city’s “vice” industries as a selling point[2].
An Imagedump of Tech Memes
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that I have an accumulation of tech memes: jokey one-liners about programming and programming languages. I’ve stored them all here.