Le Recinzioni Virtuali?
According to Babelfish and Google, "The Virtual Enclosures" translated into Italian is "Le Recinzioni Virtuali." Another site says "Gli Allegati Virtuali." Or according to Babelfish, the entire title is "Dai terreni comunali virtuali alle recinzioni virtuali: Giro e Contatore-Giro nell'età delle informazioni."
I was recently contacted by an Italian publisher who wants to translate my Virtual Enclosures article into Italian and publish it in a book and possibly also online. Cool.
I have a natural interest in the process of translation, from largely a hermeneutic persective. From one perspective, to translate a text is to do violence to that text. But from another, it will make my writings accessible to more people. This is a good thing. I wish I could read Italian so I could see how my thoughts flow in that language.
democracy spin
There is supposedly a new internet audio recording from "wanted terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi," with some
extra spin about the recording on cnn.com. From the article:
The speaker attacked the Iraqi interim government as a tool used by the "Americans to promote this lie that is called democracy ... You have to be careful of the enemy's plots that involve applying democracy in your country and confront these plots, because they only want to do so to ... give the rejectionists the rule of Iraq. And after fighting the Baathists ... and the Sunnis, they will spread their insidious beliefs, and Baghdad and all the Sunni areas will become Shiite. Even now, the signs of infidelity and polytheism are on the rise."
So of course I am suspicious of the spin here. First of all, I wonder about the translation. But this is just normal hermeneutical suspicion. But look how it is being spun: one is either for American Democracy(tm), or one is a radical muslim terrorist.
But al-Zarqawi raises an interesting point: one must be careful of the American government's spin on terms like "democracy" and "freedom." As is obvious, the US is not a democracy; in theory it is a republic, which is not the same thing. The American govt rhetoric of "spreading freedom" and "bringing democracy to the world" is just a code word for globalization and forced imposition of neoliberal economic policies.
So from where I stand, al-Zarqawi is right to be suspicious of American endeavors in Iraq. Obviously I disagree with at least some of his theological convictions, but that's to be expected. One cannot embrace the dualism of "you're with us or you're with The Terrorists(tm)." It's more complicated than that.
crazy busy
Well, given the
huge freakin winter storm that is pending, on top of the subzero temperatures, this has been by at least one order of magnitude the busiest day I've ever seen at
work. Normally, we have about 13 call receivers working, and if it's really busy there will be 8 or 10 people on hold. An average day gives us maybe 1100 calls, the busiest day I'd seen was 1700.
When I arrived at noon today, there were 30 call receivers working, 70 calls on hold, and we'd already taken over 2000 calls before noon. By now, we're pushing 4000 pretty hard. Wow. At least today is going fast. ;-)
I was planning on writing a few entries today to catch up, but we're actually too busy for that now. This is the first lull I've seen yet today. Maybe I'll have more time this evening, now that everyone is home and is braced for the storm. More anon.
FCC Localism Hearings in Portland
Apparently, the FCC is having hearings across America to
"Give Americans the chance to report how well TV and radio are serving their communities". Ummm, yeah. Serving the communities, or serving the corporate masters?
I may have to go to this....
for those who believe George W Bush was "elected"
Read
20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the US. A nice, concise summary which proves nothing (not that anything can be proven when it comes to voting in America), but at least makes one think.
physicality
I've been frustrated with my body lately. It started 3 weeks or so ago when I hurt my right shoulder hauling logs at our Yule fire. It got worse over the course of the next week, which prompted me to go see a chiropractor. He gave me an adjustment, and as I've heard is common in such instances, the spine realignment triggered a huge energy release. I think most of what I've been experiencing since then is related. The shoulder has healed; I'm sure I just tweaked a ligament or something. It's fine now. But I've dealt with nagging sicknesses; headaches, sinus problems, nausea, and this morning I awoke with a slight ache in my right ear. None of these are major; they are all more just nagging annoyances. But I'm getting very tired of them.
Another energy shift with all of this is me enacting a change in my eating habits. I've gone back and forth with healthy and unhealthy eating patterns my entire life. These days I generally eat much more nutritiously, but I still eat too much, and the times at which I eat are far from ideal. I'm a night owl, and my food intake reflects that. So 16 days ago I reinstated an old, healthy habit of mine; no more eating after 9pm. It's been surprisingly easy in terms of will. Usually I really struggle with it. So I'm glad to see myself making this real.
But physically, I've always felt best when I eat well AND exercise well. Yeah, duh. So because I haven't been feeling as well since I switched my eating habits, I haven't exercised. So it's time to get back on that. Ideally, I'd like to take a walk every day, and get to the gym 3x per week. That's a pattern that works well for me, and I think it's the next step for me towards better physicality.
on Huygens
Well, like so many people, I've been intrigued by the
data coming
back from the Huygens probe as it landed on the surface of Titan. This is certainly an impressive engineering achievement, and it also bodes well for science. Titan is one of the most compelling solar bodies in the solar system. Very cool.
But the Huygens probe is, obviously, named after the 17th century scientist, Christian Huygens. I am most familiar with his discovery of the law of entrainment, a law that has become central to my reality. The essence of this law is that a) the universe vibrates; and b) these vibrations seek to harmonize with one another. This is a proven law of physics, it is not mere mystical or new age theory. It works for all forms of energy exchange. I find that such exchanges where entrainment occurs tend to amplify the energy exchanged; it is a form of synergy. In my view, these kinds of synergistic energy exchanges feed our souls. I'm thinking of playing music with people, listening to music, sports, sex, or any other way you can imagine.
Though the Huygens probe is very cool, let's give props to the lasting impact of Huygens.
The Globe gets it
Anyone who reads
this article in The Globe, and who also has been reading this space, will find the following comments very familiar:
One of the best things about this approach is that Firefox doesn't suffer from any of the annoying pop-ups and malware that make using Internet Explorer such a pain. Since the browser uses completely different software, none of the usual tools that hackers have used to infiltrate Internet Explorer work with Firefox. Although this might change as the browser becomes more popular, the open-source nature of the project means that fixes will likely be easier to make and will also be available much faster .
Firefox has a number of features that make it obvious how little Internet Explorer has changed over the past several years. One of the most popular is the use of "tabs," which allow a user to open multiple pages within the same window. You can set Firefox so that when you click on a link it opens that link in a new tab, and the tabs you have open are grouped together in a tab toolbar at the top of your browser window. You can store a group of tabs and open them all when you load Firefox.
Other alternative browsers, such as Opera, have this feature, too, but they don't share one other thing Firefox has going for it -- its adaptability. One benefit of the open-source format is that any programmer who wants to can write a bit of software called an "extension," which adds features to the browser. There are hundreds of these extensions listed already at Firefox's home page (http://getfirefox.com), including everything from a plug-in that lets you play music from your browser toolbar to one that lets you search an on-line dictionary by clicking on a word.
So yes, this solution is becoming so obvious that even the mainstream media is starting to get it. Good to see.
If you haven't already, go get Firefox, you fools!
back where we started...
...or at least it feels that way sometimes. It is easy to forget just how much progress has been made on a large project when you're in the midst of it, having come a long way but still with a long way to go. This is how it's been with the Freakwitch project for the better part of
six weeks. Without the ability to use the studio computer, we've had to take the opportunity to write some new songs. It seems we've also taken the opportunity to ground some energy.
Well, tonight I feel like this blockage has been released. I have now restored the computer to its pre-sata glory. This means everything works, no pops and clicks in audio, so Matt and I can continue album production. But we still don't have a sane backup strategy, so in that sense I've declared defeat. But there is a new strategy in place that should take us several steps forward.
I ordered a hard drive enclosure that is compatible with SATA drives. This way, I can store data onto this same drive, and connect it both to the studio computer and to my laptop, and edit music from either computer. This means that a)data will be backed up in a sane way, and b) I'll be able to work from home, which should speed things up in terms of album production. The problem is the first one sent to me was defective, so I am sending it back to newegg and am contemplating ordering it elsewhere, since they are less than helpful with getting me one that actually works.
In addition, I ordered an audio interface for the laptop which will allow me to record audio, monitor 24-bit audio through headphones or through my speakers, and generally make audio with the laptop wherever I happen to be. It should be here early next week. I also ordered a RAM upgrade for the laptop, which I expect will speed it up dramatically. Now my laptop will have more RAM (768MB) than any other machine I have.
So in terms of production, we are back where we were 6 weeks ago. But from another perspective, we are now poised for the next round of work. Progress sometimes runs in spirals, like so many other energy patterns...
Winter on the Beach, and friends blogs
The increased amount of technical gadgetry in my life has been on my mind. The geek in me is of course delighted, while the luddite is somewhat alarmed. But regardless, these gadgets are tools that need to be judged by how they are used. I've always had an interest in photography, dating back to my high school days where I displayed a talent with finding interesting shots with a video camera in my high school's TV studio. So I've been playing more with photography since I got my digital camera. I took several shots today, and liked these two:
These images are unprocessed apart from resizing. One of my next goals is to figure out how to process images in a visually appealing way. I have some nice tools at my disposal, it's just a matter of practice and some reading. Great, yet another hobby for my Abundant Free Time.
On a related note, two friends of mine have recently started blogs. One of them, a professional photographer and my occasional political theory sparring partner, has created a photojournalist blog. Michael is a talented photographer, you should check it out. Another one is so far exploring social problems, economic problems, and their relations to science and/or mystical thinking. At least that's my interpretation of psichron. But both of these look very promising to this reader.
mmm, Kool-Aid
Well, after having resisted doing so for many, many years, my wife and I finally drank the Kool-Aid and
got cellphones. Our landline is going away as of tomorrow. So if I haven't already notified you via email, and you need my new phone number, get in touch and I'll get it to you.
It's actually cheaper to get these than to have the landline, which is very surprising. But now that we have a car, I actually feel better that my wife will have a phone with her if something happens.
Matt and I were joking last night about how much newer cellphones look like Star Trek communicators. I'm sure this joke is old and tired, but it was particularly vivid in my reality last night.
My first job out of high school (this is 1987 for those keeping score) was assembling "bag phones." Cellular phones were just starting to hit the mainstream, though most of them were the install-permanently-into-your-car variety. My job was to take one of these phones, which had the handset and a large transceiver (about the size of a shoebox), install them into a camera bag, add an antenna and solder a cigarette-lighter plug for power, and put a short stubby cellphone antenna into the package. Boom! Instant portablity! "The ultimate in mobile communications." Back in da day. And now this phone is almost too small to be useful in terms of stretching from my ear to my mouth. Very funny.
browser border skirmishes
I've just perused my web statistics for this site for the first time in a while. Since I began this site, the traffic here has steadily increased, with a few bumps (notably the Janet's tit fiasco that I satired heavily here, bringing me thousands of hits after the SuperBowl) along the way. But I've consistently had several thousand visitors per month for months now. I have no idea who is reading this, and I wish people who were reading it would feel free to comment more often. Yeah, I know. Wah.
But what intrigues me is the browser identification of people coming to my site. Supposedly, Microsoft Internet Explorer has a 90-something-percent market share. Yet, people using IE come in a distant third in popularity of browsers on my site. The breakdown goes something like this:
Netscape (compatible): 35.8%
Mozilla: 27.5%
Internet Explorer: 21.9%
Opera: 1.8%
Konqueror: 0.68%
Safari: 0.44%
Netscape: 0.25%
Galeon: 0.098%
A few notes: Netscape (compatible) is a smokescreen; it is basically browsers set to identify in a somewhat generic way. Lots of Konqueror users are set this way, as well as Safari (I imagine) and Mozilla users. So it's impossible to tell which browsers are here, other than they are NOT Internet Explorer. So the largest clearly identified browser visiting this site is Mozilla, many of which are undoubtedly Firefox users. But together, 66.5% -- almost exactly 2 out of 3 -- of my visitors are not using Internet Explorer. Very interesting indeed.
Note that the above percentages do not add up to 100%; the difference is in search engine spiders and counters.
I knew lots of people were switching away from IE, mostly to Firefox, but I had no idea it was this dramatic. I wonder how many other sites are experiencing statistics like these?
History in the Information Age
One of the things Google does is archive newsgroup posts. Newsgroups were "the thing" in terms of information exchange before the onset of the world wide web, though some would argue they are still a huge source of information. From this vast collection of data, Google has published a
20 Year Archive of usenet.
It's fascinating for a variety of reasons. First, it shows real-time reactions to major events, such as Tiananmen Square, the birth of the Web, the birth of Linux, the first mention of The Simpsons, and many other things. It strikes me as interesting to not only give a snapshot of mentalities of the time, but also as a new way to "do" history.
2004 Digital Media Awards
Richard Menta, on mp3newswire.net, has announced his 2004 Digital Media Awards. There are
winners and
losers. Some very interesting ideas in his comments. For example, he observes that Canada may hold the future for p2p hosting:
I have always talked about an American digital media industry separate from the traditional media conglomerates, but legal strife caused much of it to flee overseas. Canada, which has legalized P2P services is where this digital industry will grow as embattled and new services will start to take root there. Closer in culture to the US than any other country, English speaking Canada will have no problem serving US customers.
If the Supreme Court's ruling on the Grokster appeal goes in favor of the media industry this year. Canada will be the biggest winner, not the record or movie industries.
So the Grokster case (which also made the list) ruling by the Supreme Court, coming later this year, will largely determine the direction of digital media for years to come. The sooner the Intellectual Property capitalists realize that p2p filesharing is not going anywhere -- as evidenced by the BitTorrent phenomenon, which now counts for 1/3 of all traffic on the 'net -- the sooner we will be able to move on in the digital age of media. The Virtual Enclosures continue to battle the Virtual Commons.
Related to this is #10 on the Losers list:
10. RIAA "Sue 'em all" Campaign
Thousands of file traders have been sued by the music industry so far and the RIAA claims that these suits have succeeded in reducing file trading. That statement is false.
Just look at the average number of simultaneous users trading files as measured by Big Champagne and it is obvious that file trading increased dramatically in 2004 as the record industry filed suit after suit.
Global monthly average simultaneous users 2004:
January, 6,046,998; February, 6,831,366; March, 7,370,644; April, 7,639,479; May, 7,286,377; June, 7,401,431; July, 7,115,975; August, 6,822,312; September, 6,784,574; October, 6,255,986; and, November, 7,452,184.
US monthly average simultaneous users 2004:
January, 3,528,419; February, 4,039,989; March, 4,603,571; April, 4,688,988; May, 4,589,255; June, 4,583,920; July, 4,584,111; August, 4,549,801; September, 4,687,536; October, 4,435,395; and, November, 5,445,200.
So a key point: despite laws, lawsuits, and security technologies attempting to enforce the virtual enclosures, more people are engaging in filesharing worldwide -- with half of them in the US -- than ever before. Digital information is inherently a commons; any attempt to enclose information is arbitrary and artificial, and is furthermore damaging to the information itself and its status as a commons.
The key in this new age, many will say, is for artists to figure out how to make money with their "art" being a commons. But I would suggest that the problem is not in the artists figuring out how to profit from their art, but by the fact that society is structured such that the artists need to profit. Food for thought.
thanks for calling triple-eh, how can I help?
Well, this is the 3rd weekend in a row I've worked during a winter storm. It definitely gets busier here during these. It's kinda fun, though, in a weird way. It's good to know that I'm helping people, at least in some small way.
Though sometimes there's nothing we can do for people. It's amazing what people expect out of us at times. Like, they can't get up a hill because it's too slick, so somehow our 4-ton tow truck, with their vehicle in tow, will somehow be able to get up the same hill. Too funny.
It's gonna be a long night, methinks....
NYC police during the Republican Convention
The court cases
around arrests at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York have begun. And, well, let's just say the cops don't look so good:
Officer Wohl made several interesting assertions during his testimony suggesting to some that the falsification of arrest documents and police testimony may have been part of some sort of concerted effort by people involved in security planning for the RNC.
At one point, Wohl testified that his captain told him to arrest everyone within a certain area. Later, he stated that he could not really tell the difference between protestors, bystanders, and people merely coming and going from the library. The combination of an officer unable to discern between supposed suspects and innocent pedestrians, and an order from superior officers to make mass arrests based on geographic location rather than specific incidents, would seem to suggest there is a very real potential that large numbers of detainees were wrongly arrested and incarcerated.
This evidence indicates nothing less than state-sponsored repression of political dissent. Let no one doubt this.
an answer to my prayers?
Or at the very least, a
solution to my audio computer woes. This machine would allow me to take the offending hard drive out of my studio computer, install it into this enclosure, and connect it easily and quickly to *any* computer, including the new laptop. Hmmmmm......
The Shadow Internet
There is
an article in Wired this month called "The Shadow Internet." It provides an interesting look at the seedy underbelly of vicious sea robbers in the Internet age. The article is a very interesting and entertaining (if a bit reactionary and melodramatic) read, describing the origin of much of the "pirated" material available online, in p2p networks and such. This sharing consists of "topsites," which are highly secret, highly secure sites that host these files:
Anathema is a so-called topsite, one of 30 or so underground, highly secretive servers where nearly all of the unlicensed music, movies, and videogames available on the Internet originate. Outside of a pirate elite and the Feds who track them, few know that topsites exist. Even fewer can log in.
The article touches upon the motives of these "pirates" (arrr, matey...):
It's all a big game and, to hear Frank and others talk about "the scene," fantastic fun. Whoever transfers the most files to the most sites in the least amount of time wins. There are elaborate rules, with prizes in the offing and reputations at stake. Topsites like Anathema are at the apex. Once a file is posted to a topsite, it starts a rapid descent through wider and wider levels of an invisible network, multiplying exponentially along the way. At each step, more and more pirates pitch in to keep the avalanche tumbling downward. Finally, thousands, perhaps millions, of copies - all the progeny of that original file - spill into the public peer-to-peer networks: Kazaa, LimeWire, Morpheus. Without this duplication and distribution structure providing content, the P2P networks would run dry. (BitTorrent, a faster and more efficient type of P2P file-sharing, is an exception. But at present there are far fewer BitTorrent users.)
Interesting stuff. It seems to me that these people share something similar to the old
hacker ethos; the practice of modifying machines (either hardware or software) and being clever about it. Bottom line, it's fun and the challenge of sharing with this technology that drives them, not some malicious desire to steal. When the Intellectual Property intelligentsia realize this, they'll see that it's less of a problem than they're making it out to be.
