Suffice it [...]]]> I make very little secret that I despise Charlie Sheen and ‘Two and a Half Men’ with a passion greater than the Pope has for Christ. So I am torn, because I am not normally the type of person that tramples on man’s… well… not grave… ummmm… tramples on a man’s hallucinogenic flying galactic unicorn.

Suffice it to say, this quote sums up my thoughts:

“When a production company and network are willing to hire someone who is a convicted felon and accused of putting a knife to his wife’s throat, and they know that this person has substance abuse problems, it’s obvious that their position in this dispute is ridiculous” —  Marty Singer, Sheen’s attorney

So that is his argument? I am a drug addicted, law breaking, narcissist and therefore you should have expected this and therefore continued to employ me!?? Jesus, Charlie, you have really gone off the deep end! By this logic no company should ever hire a former arsonist, because they could only expect that he’d burn down their office.

In a weird way, Charlie’s life mimics the exact reason why I hate the show he stars in: Juvenile behaviour is worshipped in our society. Until the tragic earthquake off the Japanese coast, Charlie dominated newspapers. His life is not news people!

Anyway, go ahead and watch the reruns. I hear that in tonight’s episode Charlie makes a sexually suggestive joke about a gorgeous woman he just met and had intercourse with…

This week I was in London every day for work and [...]]]> The British Government just enacted a law which takes affect in roughly one year which will ban cigarette and other tobacco products from being displayed in shops. Instead they will need to be stored below the counter and asked for directly by the customer.

This week I was in London every day for work and on the way home read the free evening newspaper “The Evening Standard”, which ran multiple opinions and stories about this news event. Two in particular struck me as interesting.

In the first one a politician was arguing for this ban by saying: (paraphrased) “[The Government] has to do everything it can to cut back on cigarette availability to curb the number of smokers in this country”. If I was inside of his head during this interview I wonder if I would have heard the extension to that sentence: “… with the exception, of course, of making them illegal, because we couldn’t survive without the copious amounts of taxes they bring in.”

As a non-smoker living in a free country these political games of attempting to coerce our behaviour sicken me. The millions spent on this futile fight surely would be better served elsewhere; which leads to the second article.

In this opinion letter the writer argues (only half tongue-in-cheek) that we are being socially irresponsible by not smoking. An interesting premise, and here is why. He argues that because of our advancements in health care and medicines we are living much longer. Life expectancy ranges between 75-85 in the western world. However, most countries have a retirement age of 60-65. Which means for 15-20 years people who live in social service countries are drawing on pensions a lot longer than when these original legislations were passed. His argument is that by stopping people from smoking, you are losing valuable tax money, and then paying that person, who may have died younger because of smoking, for more years of his life you saved. The government is actually shooting itself in the foot twice! On top of that, because treatments are getting cheaper everyday, it is now or soon will be cheaper to treat that person for his eventual disease, then pay his pension. Economically speaking the government has made a very irrational decision. By ‘protecting’ their constituents, they are in fact hurting their cash flow, which in turn will hurt their constituents.

The problem is that the government’s motivations have nothing to do with the public well being. Their motivations are to please activist and lobby groups to solidify votes so the can be re-elected again and continue to draw their paycheques.

I mentioned this during the Environmental Summit meetings a while back; world leaders aren’t experts on things. They are experts at being politicians, not scientists who understand the environment, economists who understand financial models, doctors who understand healthcare. So having governments make decisions about these things without completely researching the subject with the top members of the specific field is asinine.

There is a good reason why I am not allowed to prescribe medication to someone or to sign off on designs for a traffic bridge. Why do we allow non-experts in our government make these uninformed decisions?

Of course, thorough research and investigation cost money and take time, neither of which the government really has in their relatively short terms.

There are certain prejudices that people fight and die for: Race, gender, religion, disability. Yet others we not only accept, but openly perpetuate without any sense of moral infraction (Gender based car insurance premiums is probably one of the most prolific). You could argue that smokers are now a part of this list. A few western countries seems so preoccupied with discriminating against smokers by forcing their habit underground it is like we are entering a state of prohibition on cigarettes, and we all know how well that worked.

In Germany offices, airports and other buildings have smoking rooms. Sealed off areas for smokers, which have ventilation and provide a warm, indoor place which doesn’t disturb the non-smoking crowd. Also their vast number of automated cigarette dispensers, check your age and dispense cigarettes at anytime of the day. The public there must be horrified to be forced to look at cigarette s and smokers everywhere! Or perhaps they realize that people make choices and in a free country they shouldn’t be persecuted for them.

Governments need to stop focusing money attempting to adjust a relatively small proportion of the public’s habits and put that money into healthcare and education programs that can benefit everyone. A child without a textbook in his classroom doesn’t give a shit if cigarettes are on display, because without those textbooks he’ll be too illiterate to read the display anyway.

Their first recommendation was to “…put in place more effective age verification [...]]]> The US Federal Trade Commission recently released a report about how online/virtual ‘worlds’ protect underage children from harmful or explicit images. They investigated the mechanisms these companies put in place to ensure that children 13 and under did not access “things they shouldn’t.”

Their first recommendation was to “…put in place more effective age verification methodology.”  Well, holy shit! They cracked it! It angers me when an agency, government or not, comes up with a recommendation that is as useful as, “My plan is to come up with a plan.” A 2-year-old could have figured out that the reason why they can log into adult online ‘worlds’ is because there is no mechanism to prevent them!

But what is the solution? The fact of the matter is there is none. Just as 16-year-olds can use their sibling’s ID to get into a bar illegally, condoms are not 100% effective, and people continue to inexplicably love Two and Half Men, there is no protection that can successfully eliminate an intentional desire to do “things they shouldn’t,” except blocking out the potential altogether. In this example, that would include shutting down all bars, not having sex, and killing Charlie Sheen. Alternately, there is the the always popular ‘lock yourself in an opaque box’.

There are really two problems at play here, and neither have to do with technology.

1. Accidental access: While this kills my sex analogy because in my research, accidental sex isn’t that easy… You can certainly accidentally wander into a bar, a naughty website, or flick onto a tv show that shouldn’t be on the air.
2. Purposeful circumvention:  You can purposely attempt to buy beer underage, lie about your birth date on the web or in paperwork, and tune into CBS.

Before we go any further, we will never stop number 2. As I said above, the FCC, FTC, FDA et. al. and their world wide equivalents can do all they want and spend billions of currency units, but if someone wants to do something and they can find a way, they will do it. Just as Philippe Petit (“Man on Wire”, highly recommend watching), DB Cooper, the 9/11 perpetrators, etc., etc. proved: “You can do whatever you want.”  By the way, does anyone else see the irony in that guidance councillors use that phrase as a build up to young students, and then we spend government money trying to figure out ways to prevent young students from doing so?

Now in the accidental case the FTC found that even in ‘virtual worlds’ that were kid friendly, there were sexually explicit references, violence, and other “things they shouldn’t” have access too. This is nothing new, I mean go back and watch old cartoons, movies, read comic books, or walk down any street in a major city. Now stop. The reason we have to go back and re-watch the cartoons and movies, or re-read the comic books is because in most cases we were too innocent to get the joke. The reason why this next generation (who have been surfing for porn since they could double click their index finger) is growing up so fast is not because there are subtle references in their world to all of this, it is because sex, violence, drugs and the like are promoted on a daily basis to them as ‘bad’, and ‘bad’ things are intriguing! Remember?! Forget the sexually suggestive graphic in Sims online. 12-year-old girls see women in short skirts on tv or on the street and then go and buy “Cosmo: The pedophile edition” to find out why, or the 8-year-old who knows in explicit detail what a blow job is because MTV bleeps out mysterious words, so the curious mind has to go and find out why! And to add to it all, today they have the capability find out quite quickly, whereas when we were young we only had older siblings or ‘the cool aunt’.

We played cops and robbers as kids and never even put together the fact that this was violence personified.  Today they play cowboys and Indians and are scolded because it is racist to portray Indians in that manner!

We try and protect kids against things they don’t understand, and they therefore want to understand it, and at an age too young to comprehend it. Instead of letting them hear the word “Fuck” and explaining that society doesn’t want them to use that word (A-whole-nother blog entry there), or letting them play with blissful ignorance without imparting our adult morals, we attempt to hide what has always been in the open and then wonder why they become more interested in it. Kids don’t need our adult constructs forced upon them. While we need to monitor their access to various things, whether it be bad TV or naughty websites, we should do this in an effort to guide them morally, not force them to learn adult life lessons at a younger and younger age.

PS: I hate Two and Half Men.

I am tired, absolutely tired of phrases like “only # medals” and “disappointment” and “let down”. Canada is having one of their best games ever and continue to have hopes with a week left in the games.

Last night we lost, arguably, the most anticipated single game of the Olympics and what [...]]]> Dear Canadian Media,

I am tired, absolutely tired of phrases like “only # medals” and “disappointment” and “let down”. Canada is having one of their best games ever and continue to have hopes with a week left in the games.

Last night we lost, arguably, the most anticipated single game of the Olympics and what happened? We were on the streets of Vancouver with flags, horns, spontaneous national anthem singing, chants for our country and our athletes. I have seen the Maple Leaf on clothing and body parts here that I didn’t even know you could put it on.

The Canadian public is more psyched than ever before. Stop making up useless news and report the facts. Do the country you claim to represent proud and support these athletes who deserve more respect than the millionaire entertainers in the NBA, MLB, NFL etc.

I, for one, am not only impressed by our athletes, but feel absolutely lucky to be involved in this display of undeniable patriotism that rarely peeks through in The Great White North.

GO CANADA GO!

Sincerely,
A Canadian

By now we have all heard about Conan and Leno dueling it out for the sacred 11:35 slot on NBC. However, the situation brings to light something that hasn’t yet sunk in at most major corporations yet. The public is changing.

I have been doing an excessive amount of coding lately, for both work and for personal things and I found that I use the same handful of JAVA methods in sequence to perform many tasks. Specifically around persisting/converting data.

So in an effort to make [...]]]> WARNING: Geeks only. (Persistent Link on the left hand side)

I have been doing an excessive amount of coding lately, for both work and for personal things and I found that I use the same handful of JAVA methods in sequence to perform many tasks. Specifically around persisting/converting data.

So in an effort to make my life easier I created a series of String and File utilities that I can call to avoid having to copy/paste and adjust dozens of lines of code.

The API is generic and mostly Object agnostic. I went through and fully documented all the methods, and I also overloaded many of the methods for the base case and specific cases.

I am posting it online here for people to use.:

• Java JAR
• JavaDocs
• .NET DLL*
• Sample Class

I think eventually this will be “open source” in the sense I will let people add to it, but for the time being I’ll just see if anyone actually has an interest in it.

*Although not fully tested, There is a DLL version of this API. The DLL was generated using a neat little utility called IKVM. The ability to convert JARs to DLLs is really useful!

You can run the Test Class by executing “java -jar util_api_1.0.jar”

This requires Java 6.

Anyway, Please feel free to download and check out. Suggestions/Comments welcome.

1)      A UK worker being fired for comments that her job was boring.

2)      Employees [...]]]> I’m tired of reading about people ‘losing privacy’ with Facebook and Twitter. People are not losing their privacy; they are losing their common sense. There was an article this morning in the paper which cited examples of ‘loss of privacy’:

1)      A UK worker being fired for comments that her job was boring.

2)      Employees in a service industry being reprimanded for posting negative comments about customers on their social sites.

3)      Causing of problems in relationships when one person makes relationship-based remarks, or when a person ‘updates their relationship status’ without approval of the other party.

Hold on, none of those are examples of losing privacy; they all made their opinion public on purpose. Everyone at one time or another is bored at work. Everyone complains about idiots they have to deal with, and everyone has relationship troubles. It isn’t the fact that those people had those thoughts; it is the fact that they consciously made the thought public. Consciously making something known to people is not losing privacy, losing privacy is something that you didn’t make known to people, becoming known to people. For example, having your private diary published, or your best friend write a tell-all book about you, or a doctor telling everyone about your genital herpes is a loss of privacy.  Standing on a box in the middle of Times Square and screaming that you have genital herpes, or handing out free copies of your sex tapes to strangers is not a loss of privacy.

If Facebook openly released all of your pictures to the general public, not just registered Facebook users or specifically your ‘friends’, then that is an invasion, but they don’t (I didn’t say can’t). In fact, they are putting in more restrictions around what can be seen.

We live in a knowledge-starved world. We put Tiger Woods on the front page because we found out he had a secret, but then scream bloody murder when someone finds out ours. We can’t have it both ways.

The sad part is that government agencies are spending millions to study Facebook for security holes, when in reality we live in a society that cares less about privacy and more about reading about our acquaintances’ lives than ever before.  If something isn’t meant to be public, don’t make it public. It is as simple of that. Posting “I’ve had a horrible day,” is enormously different than posting “I hate my boss and work is shit.”  Facebook does not require the same level of professionalism as a man in a suit in front of a microphone (but then again, even Obama called Kanye a “Jackass”), but it does require some common sense.

And you want to talk about privacy? Well how about laws that restrict who you can love/marry, in what orifice you can have sex, or upcoming flight rules that you can either be photographed in an ‘naked scanner’ machine or have your genitalia juggled before you can get on an airplane? We don’t live in a private society at all when a government can invade it like that. BTW: This is for another entry, but ‘naked scanner’ is by far the newest gross exaggerated term. Given the above two options I will gladly let a couple people stare at my colourless, featureless ‘naked’ body only to have the picture removed immediately upon exiting the scanner. It’s not like Playboy is standing behind them saying “Yep, I’ll take that one for our ‘frequent flyers’ issue.” In those pictures you are no more nude than that chick’s silhouette on a trucker’s mud flaps.

This last year 3 or 4 guys got caught for misuse of a firearm and animal cruelty because they did really stupid, depraved things to a duck during a hunting trip. They got caught, not because someone discovered the duck, but because they posted themselves on YouTube doing it. Had that not happened, the ducks would have decayed or been eaten and, assuming they wouldn’t brag about it (which is a stretch based on the video), they certainly wouldn’t have been charged.

Why haven’t we learned from this? Because we are not used to a truly global media. While screaming on top of a box in Times Square all of your dirty secrets certainly isn’t maintaining privacy, it is not the same as electronically posting something that within seconds the entire world can see… Until, of course, someone starts streaming your NYC rant. Which really poses the question, do we have any privacy anymore? If anyone can video/photograph us doing anything and YouTube it, wouldn’t you think that would make everyone more afraid than the stuff they knowingly post? It sure does for me…

There was a Republican senator on CNN this week denouncing Obama because “…he took 3 days to respond to the [...]]]> As we all know by now on Christmas day a man attempted to detonate an explosive on a flight as it was descending into Detroit. The media reported this almost immediately as a “terrorist attack”.

There was a Republican senator on CNN this week denouncing Obama because “…he took 3 days to respond to the attempted terrorist attack,” and “…was too busy with the war in Iraq and pushing his Healthcare agenda to care about airport security”.

Of course he fucking was! The American people elected him because that’s what he’d said he’d do!  Airport security is not a political issue. Blaming Obama for a bomber boarding a plane in Amsterdam is like blaming the Queen because Royal Mail lost your package. A government owned agency failed here, not the leader of the government.

I promise you if Obama was told “Hey, man… Some Nigerian guy is gonna board an airplane in Holland with a bomb in his underpants,” he would have called someone and said “Yo, can you figure out how to stop that from, you know, like, happening?”.

Also on CNN they had a former head of the 9/11 commision on who commented that Obama was reluctant to use the word terrorism and therefore was undermining the event. I don’t care if the attacker is on a terrorist mission or a deranged girl scout who was driven to commit mass murder because of an unfortunate cookie selling incident: If a plane blows up it is a failure of the security preventing that from happening, which is exactly what Obama said it was.

World leaders don’t have a red S on their chests and fly around at night saving damsels in distress, they are human, and if you think world leaders know everything about their countries like some sort of human-embodied-omnipotent being, then your sadly mistaken. It’s just like the fiasco of the environmental conference in Denmark. Sending Stephen Harper to an environmental convention is as useful as sending Andy Dick to a vagina convention. Neither know anything about the subject, except what they are told by their peers. Let people who know science sort out the environment issues and make a global recommendation. You wouldn’t hire the CEO of Canadian Tire to fix your car right? You’d hire the mechanics who he employs to do it, because they are the experts.

All of this is to use the media to enhance public perception, because in the end that’s what wins elections, and the Obamas/Harpers/Browns of the world all want to keep their pay cheques. Harper has to flash his smile in Denmark so that when the opposition puts their foot in their mouth for the millionth time of this parliament he can say “Well, I care about the environment, see? I saved my boarding pass!” And in the same way, even if you’ve never flown and have zero intention on doing so, having you PM or President stand up and say, “I am doing everything I can to protect you,” (whether from scary Nigerians or that pesky global warming) makes it desirable to vote for them.

The truth is, flying affects a fractionally small proportion of the population. It’s the media that portrays this as an issue of the masses and politicizes it. Restricting people from having liquids because someone once wanted to use a liquid for evil on a flight makes as much sense as making condoms out of steel because one in a few hundred break. (For more on this I suggest this article)

I am not going to die because a newly-wed couple wants to fly to the Dominican on their honeymoon, and you aren’t going to die because someone who happened to be born in Yemen is on your flight. We’re going to die because people die. I know we loving playing God, but in the end we all die. Whether a nutjob blows us up, or we have a heart attack after eating the large fries at TGIF, we will die. And for the record nutjobs come from everywhere, not just the 14 nations now on a permanent ‘frisk list’ by US order.

Flying is safe, don’t let a hypochondriac set of politicians and a fear mongering  news network who couldn’t fill a day with 30 minutes of actual news change your mind about that.

With the fall of Napster, Supernova, Pirate Bay and now this I [...]]]> Recently the file sharing site Mininova decided to stop hosting any torrent that was not sent in from a registered user with rights to the material that was being posted. It was if a million file sharers suddenly screamed and then were silenced…

With the fall of Napster, Supernova, Pirate Bay and now this I wonder the impact any of these widely publicized mini-victories has had?

The American “War on Drugs” was a late 60′s initiative and while various reports indicate drug use is down, an equal or greater number seem to report little change. Which isn’t surprising to me. If I ask any random yes or no question to any x number of people the result will likely vary from survey to survey.

It is impossible to determine the exact number of drug users for a variety of reasons. Avoiding the “since drugs being illegal, there is an apprehension about discussing their use” cliche, consider how I could go about calculating the number of smokers.

Obviously countries, and regions within those have different habits of smoking habits. If you broke down those regions based on something say like #of packs sold in a week, then determined the average number of cigarettes a smoker in that region smoked you could then calculate an estimate on the number of smokers in that region. Add all the regions up and (albeit with a fairly high margin of error), you could still get an idea of # of smokers..

There is no way to do this with illegal drugs in most of the western world. There is no idea how much of the product exists, and therefore no idea how much is sold and therefore no accurate measure of the use, or for that matter the change in use.

I am not arguing that the War on Drugs hasn’t worked, I am arguing that there is little they could do to prove it has and it has been going on since the 60s!

Assuming we know that for 40 years the government of the US (and many other countries) has put billions into fighting a war on something which we also know still exists and have no real way of measuring any affect, what does that mean in the case of Internet file sharing? Is the War on Pirated Music/Video identical to the War on Drugs?

Before every movie in the UK there is an ad with a famous person saying don’t copy this movie and there are plenty of celebrity anti-drug campaigns out there.  The agencies doing the fighting have just as much propaganda available see the little bit I did on drug propaganda previously and the RIAA’s wonderful news releases on their slowly being killed industry which set a new record for profits last year.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not indicating that because music and theatres are making money this legitimises  illegal actions, what I am simply putting forth is that fighting something that isn’t going to go away is like randomly waving your hand in the air with hopes it’ll hit and kill a fly.

It took 40 years to make an insignificant dent (if there is one at all) in drug use with “The War on Drugs” and its Most Wanted culprits are still in daily use. My bet is that the Internet landscape will change so vastly in the next 40 years that by the time the corporations fighting this massive swarm of file sharing website “flies” by waving lawsuit “flyswatters” randomly around the world the technology will have advanced far past today’s torrents and will become even more widespread.  Their method is too much like peeing in the Atlantic Ocean:  It isn’t going to change the pH level of the Pacific.

Google Wave will change virtual communication. It won’t be over night, and it won’t be accepted by all, but then again Facebook was founded in 2004 [...]]]> The beta of Google Wave has started, and I begged and grovelled for an invite and a friend was gracious enough to send one over. Here are my first thoughts.

Google Wave will change virtual communication. It won’t be over night, and it won’t be accepted by all, but then again Facebook was founded in 2004 and didn’t take off until 2 years later and Twitter is just finding an audience after 3 years in obscurity.

Social Networking in the virtual world is an interesting beast. While Twitter still hasn’t found a model to make decent money, and websites that collate/sort/rate/track tweets are popping up everywhere trying to be the first to make financial gain off of Mr. Dorsey’s brainchild. Facebook went from a simple and usable interface to an ad-centric model where instead of putting your friends at the top put a series of sponsored ads, tailored for you by data mining your profile. How kind. The same can be said about MSN (sic) aka Windows Live Messenger.

Since the Web has grown into a marketer’s wet dream and consumers are demanding everything for free, there seems to be a skew on the supply and demand charts. Because of that it means the newest challenge is balancing ads and ad space alongside product. And this is where Google thrives. Whether we talk about their minimalistic search engine interface (which makes Yahoo’s and MSN’s webpages look like a a 3 year old’s finger painting from the 60′s) to the subtle scrolling ads in Gmail: Google has nailed the balance of making free products while still capitalizing on the lust of web marketers.

So what does all of this have to do with Wave changing the virtual communication landscape? Wave currently is a ad-less, persistent, collaborative, realtime, multimedia, open source communication tool. I am sure the lack of ads will end coincidentally at the same time as the beta program. But the rest of my adjectives are a huge distinction from what is currently available.

At the moment products such as WebEx and Net Meeting dominate in the web conferencing space right now. While desktop sharing is a must in our international business world, what these technologies lack is the collaborative nature of a meeting. These products allow one user to display their screens, “whiteboard” and allow a basic MSNesque like text chat. While Wave lacks the desktop sharing, the ability to, in real time, share links, sites, photos, and a variety of other “gadgets” (polls are quite interesting where people can vote on any question and the tallies are immediately updated). How would this affect taking meeting notes, minutes etc? Every try to take a poll in a group chat room or over a conference call? Think about group projects in a university setting and how much easier it would be to all make decisions from the comfort of your home, in a “secure” (more notes on this later) and 100% traceable, copyable, printable way? No more will you argue over who said they’d print off the report.

Multimedia is a huge plus. How nice is it that you can add a gadget that shows a direct map to your place while you are “chatting” about directions to your place. No more need to lose a link in an accidentally closed MSN window, or having a subject less email with a static screenshot attached.  And the small fact that it uses rich text. Now you can give your thoughts headings and highlight important words. Now when you copy and paste from one medium to another you won’ t get stupid bats flying in your post, or lose the spacing/formatting so you have alphabet soup on your screen. In the end this provides a clearer message to the people you are communicating with.(Did I mention inline spell checking?)

Persistence. This is a huge problem with the web in general. Say goodbye to losing a lengthy Facebook message after accidentally clicking “back” or closing your browser. Wave stores your details in realtime. If you hit the k button, not only does everyone see that you hit that button, but you can immediately close your browser without any “save” keystroke and it persists. Add to that that you can file your sessions, re-open, re-play or continue them at any time and this is the most persistent capability the web offers today. Another key to all of this is that you don’t have random MSN-style .rtf files saved all over your harddrive with cryptic names like “chat with John” or “sweet cyber sex”.

Another feature is the concept of “Public Waves”. This is(*ahem* will be) the ultimate combination of mIRC, Internet forums, Message boards, CraigsList and knowledge bases. Combine the entire global community speaking on any subject in a realtime fashion with the search and storage capabilities of Google. It’ll put Yahoo Questions to shame.

And finally on my “pro’s” list, open source.  Once the hardcore geeks get a hold of this (I’ve already read that the race for the first usable iPhone and Blackberry apps is on) the possibilities are endless. Put on an MSN skin that minimizes the product into a compact chat forum for just you and your friends, build it into a WebEx-like technology to combine realtime knowledge and data share with PowerPoint and desktop presentations. An infinite communication market has just been opened up!

Of course with any great technology comes the bad.  At the moment security is a huge concern. Notwithstanding the recent Google problems with security; Are corporations going to trust their internal data to Google.  I don’t know the answer to this question. But in the open source world, I am sure that someone can develop quite quickly a security model that addresses the concerns that will undoubtedly arise.

The current interface is clunky and unintuitive and forces you (practically) to be in a full screen mode. This isn’t useful for most of us in our multitasking culture. Again, open source to the rescue.

The tracking issue. Google is renowned, and routinely chastised, for gathering data. And while I still agree that tracking my searches is a help to me, is tracking every personal/professional conversation I have necessary? I haven’t read a lot on this topic yet, I hope to shortly, but I have to assume some level of data mining is occurring.  What will this do to corporate use? It would be a stumbling block I am sure for this technology to take off on that front. For the public market? Well, 300 million people use Facebook and that site is entirely about mining data.

WebEx and Net Meeting are bloated and for no good reason. They require downloads and constant updates and still tend to be prone to errors outside of the IE world. Wave has none of these problems. The slickness of Google has yet again struck.

All in all, I 100% agree with Google’s marketing of this technology that Google Wave is what “e-mail” would have been if it was invented from scratch, and not made to mimic the existing postal system we had world wide.It took almost 3 years for Gmail to open to the general public and now it boasts 150 million users, both corporate and personal. I am very excited for the next 3 years.

First lets be clear:  These guys are NOT hackers. They are not. At very best they [...]]]> Regarding the recent news of the e-mail phishing scam on Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail (and presumably others) my blood has been absolutely boiling over the horribly inaccurate, sensationalistic comments that are being published in all sorts of reputable newpapers!

First lets be clear:  These guys are NOT hackers. They are not. At very best they are clever people who realized that you can get people that are less clever to tell you things they shouldn’t. This is not new to e-mail, Facebook, corporate logins… In fact people take advantage of less clever people all the time. 3card monte in some form has existed for centuries and continues to fool people! Yesterday and today a fake Amber Alert message has been circulating the web, thousands have been fooled into propagating a false message. Tricking people is not the same as hacking. mafiaboy is a hacker. Kevin Mitnik was a hacker (although he was never malicious and wrongfully imprisoned).

The people who did this have done nothing wrong (I assume the lawyers for the above companies will disagree)… They asked for people’s passwords and the people gave them to them, I can do that right now: Please send me your passwords… In fact post them directly below this entry so that everyone can see them…. Sure they set up a fancy phishing site and sure they claimed to be someone they aren’t, but that is immoral, not malicious. Now, the people that use those passwords for malicious purposes are the ones breaking the law. Just as it is illegal for me to open your (snail) mail. (and yes, I concede these people could be one and the same, but it is important to distinguish that, which the media is not)

The problem, and I know I have beaten this to death, is that people seem to think technology is something new, and it isn’t. It is an adaptation of something. All technology is is an advancement of a previous incarnation of something else. Cell phones are an advancement of cordless phones, which are an advancement from corded phones, where were an enhancement on dial phones, which were an advancement on  the original switchhook phones, and the cycle goes back to the first person to every tie a string between two cups. The concept and basic requirement is the same in all of these cases: I have information and I want to share it with someone who isn’t within sound wave receiving distance of my voice.

And finally, the calls for “increased security” and “more education” at these companies is absolutely preposterous.  There is NO level of security or education that can prevent a person divulging personal information. How hard is it to understand “Don’t tell people your password.”? And yes, these guys used a sophisticated website to garner this information, but how is Google to prevent people from writing a webpage that looks like theirs? I mean I could mock up a Gmail page and have it be identical to it. How do you teach the mass public to make sure the website they are typing personal data into is legit? Well forward this Blog URL to 15 people and you will find out, because if you don’t you will have bad sex for the rest of your life! I mean after dozens of friends sending me hundreds of those over the past 10 years I am sure they all learned that that is a scam…

Contrary to popular belief, people do not learn from their mistakes.

Circumcision isn't as popular in Europe

The [...]]]> As recommended by a friend and source of always different and enjoyable reading/viewing material, I recently started watching “True Blood”. For those of you that haven’t seen it, I will try not to issue too many spoilers, at least none that a pre-pubescent goth freak couldn’t grasp about 12.5 minutes into the first episode.

The show overall is enjoyable. I can willing suspend my belief that in this world vampires exist and Anna Paquin can read thoughts as a relatively good plot device, between her periodically losing her fake southern drawl that is. But, I do have to admit Mel Gibson did a better job using such a talent to his benefit, I mean banging Helen Hunt & Marissa Tomei in one movie? Good for him…. I digress…

A few things I find interesting:

For a religious small town in New Orleans, these people not only have crazy amounts of sex, the sex itself is more wild and elaborate than most Private releases.  However that isn’t the disturbing part. what disturbs me is that before many of these sexcapades that would make Jenna Haze blush, they make it very clear to each other that they have had plenty of sex ,with plenty of people, and sometimes even state that it was just earlier that day. In fact, when our heroin Anna Paquin finally gives up her cherry, in what can only be described as the best display of breasts on television in 2008,  she feels it necessary to scream it out loud… to a bar full of people… where she works… which the guy she just went on a date with a couple nights before owns…The few days after she discovered two loved one’s murdered bodies… But,hell,  she had great hooters though, eh?

And  then there is Jason, the brother, who I can only picture as an homage to Ellis’ Patrick Bateman, who fucks a girl doggy style behind a bar, while covered in garbage. I am all for adventure, and exhibition… but seriously? I am pretty sure I saw his truck in the background of the shot, it was 20 yard away… trade-offs, man, trade-offs…

Now, for a country that has been fighting the war on drugs so long that the girls they initially were targeting now have more problem with their nipples touching the ground, than with excessive marijuana use,  they certainly are promoting the hell out of “V” (aka Vampire Blood). This apparently is a miracle drug! It saves a person’s life by miraculously healing her and giving her a dog’s smell and a bat’s hearing, then in one episode it acts like Viagra on Ecstasy and pumps up a guys cock in the most fake erection through the pants seen in TV history, and in the very next show it makes fireworks shoot of some guest star girl’s tits. Well, truth be told I see fireworks every time I see tits too, that has less to do with drugs… It also has this magical power of making you fuck up everything in your life. But then again, don’t all drugs? Don’t do drugs kids.

The other thing that is interesting about this town is that everyone seems to have a job (or 2) and they never need to go. I think the phrase “<blank> isn’t coming in today” is uttered once per episode. But, I mean I guess there are more important things to do, like getting arrested for every girl you sleep with dying, but then getting let go after the cliffhanger, or trot around town with a vampire who you have more of a Ross/Rachel relationship with than me and my constant love/hate affair with Tostitos.

Now, what is missing from this review? Oh yeah, the VAMPIRES! For a show that has a premise of vampires, they are really nothing but a subplot and allusion to the black/white race issues of the southern US. It isn’t even an allusion, actually. It is referenced in the damn title sequence!

The references to this are not poetic and are not subtext-ed at all. The characters bringing up segregated bars, a main character comments, after her daughter notes how white a vampire is, “No honey, we’re white”.  The continuous assertion that a “few bad apples are making all vampires look bad” and even the utterance that once you go vampire you never go back (Doesn’t really have the same ring to it, does it?)… Do they really need to spell this out anymore?

In the end, entertaining. Not my favourite show, but I find myself caring a little bit for what happens, and when sitting alone in a hotel it makes for good watching… wait, did you just say there is porn on the Internet? umm… bye…

Firstly, a friend and former co-worker in his late 20′s lost his battle to cancer a [...]]]> I’ve been think a lot about death lately. Before you raise your eyebrows, it isn’t a bad thing. There have just been a few things in my life lately that brought the subject up. I’ve outlined a couple below.

Firstly, a friend and former co-worker in his late 20′s lost his battle to cancer a few weeks ago. I truly hope he is in a better place now and his suffering has ended. What particularly struck me was that his Facebook page for days was appended with kind and supporting words for him and his family, this was something I hadn’t seen before.

This made me wonder about the role technology plays in death. This blog is hosted by a 3rd party company which I pay a fee to annually. Assuming my credit card isn’t cancelled immediately and my passing happened around renewal time, it is fair to say that this page could exist up to a year after me. I am fairly positive Facebook/Twitter and similar web apps have policies around dormant accounts being deleted, but again there would be a lag between my last breath and my account’s. But once gone from the servers, all my thoughts, all my pictures, everything is gone for good.

Secondly I reference a conversation between Andrew and I on our trip to India. While Andrew is a friend and we know each other well, he certainly  wouldn’t know my parents, my home town and probably couldn’t remember the company I work for. This is no slight to him at all. This is the way many friendships start, and I could same about myself in relation to him. The conversation starter was “what if something had happened to one or both of us on some dark back alley in India?”

The easy case is both of us “disappeared”, because quite frankly that would be it. My friends and family would have no idea where I was. Aside from my odd email home to give an update on recent events, I never gave addresses of hotels or any indication of future plans. Truth be told as we got on the plane to India all we knew was that we were landing in Delhi, nothing more about the rest of our journey.

I read an article once about a man whose girlfriend was on vacation in Hong Kong. She txt’d him one night saying she was going to bed and was never heard from again. He flew over to Hong Kong with conviction that in a city of 7 million he could track her down. Of course as the news usually goes, I never saw the end of the story. 

That was in a city of 7 million, Delhi has 14 million. I doubt very much that doubling the population or even halving it for that matter changes the magnitude of a search like that.

But the case that is more interesting is what if one of us had disappeared.

Back to technology.

When I was in highschool a friend passed away suddenly after being struck by lightning. His closest friends created a collage of photos, printed them on large paper in colour and gave them out in remembrance of him. This poster still hangs on my wall in my room 9 or more years later.

If I fast forward 9 years, will my colleague’s facebook page still exist? Certianly not.

Technology is a double edged sword. It has the potential to bring us together easier, we can share photos, events, news instantly around the world, but in the same regard, once the medium we use to do that sharing is obsolete we have nothing left but a memory.

If Andrew had disappeared in India, I could have used Facebook or some other technology to find his friends and family and notify them of the situation. We could then use mobile phones, email, webpages, news media etc. to get the word out. While tragic, technology would help me almost isntantly get to the people who need to know, without me having ever met those people. 

The other edge? In 30 years we won’t be able to sit with our grandkids and flip through a photo album. Assuming our harddrives/USB keys/DVD-Rs last that long, we might be able to flip through them on the some antique JPG viewer. But somehow I think this is unlikely. How many memories have you lost because of a harddrive crash? A computer virus? A lost usb key or a misplaced CD? 10 years ago it would have taken a basement flood, or a fire to destroy these things, now it is as simple as a magnetic getting too close to your MacBook or a power surge in your apartment, or a thumbdrive slipping out of your pocket.

I am not a Facebook page, a Twitter account or even this blog. These 3 things are put into an infinite equation that makes up “me”. The fact that these will outlast me, regardless of when I die is a scary thought, because that means that in theory  instead of people’s last memory of me being the last time we met for a beer or our last day of work together, it will be my last blog entry, or my last update on Twitter.

I have been in countless museums and read and seen images on papyrus, animal skins, bark, stone… These are universal and although they decay, in general they transcend time. They are hundreds and even thousands of years old. You’d be hard pressed to find something to look at files on a floppy disk these days, and this medium was still widely used just 10 years ago, and jsut plain forget about the technologies the files on those disks are stored in.

I hope I remember the times I had with my friends mentioned above 30 years from now, hell I hope I can remember my own name 30 years from now… I just don’t want to have to bet on technology to be the mechanism for my memories.

JD and Their Ducks

In that ime I have learned a few things and thought I would share.

1) I am white and rich  - It sounds almost racist, but in a country of over 1 billion Indian residents being white makes you stand [...]]]> Greetings from India where my friend Andrew and I have been traveling around for 2 weeks now!

In that ime I have learned a few things and thought I would share.

1) I am white and rich
 - It sounds almost racist, but in a country of over 1 billion Indian residents being white makes you stand out like Elton John at a mennonite convention. In most of the countries I visit I stand out because of my “American” accent. Here I stand out because of my skin colour. Sadly I cannot change either of these traits.
To many of the touts and cab drivers a white person is a walking wallet that never runs out. For example I was at a 16th century mosque built by King Akbar. After being followed around for 15 minutes by a man selling stone necklaces “perfect for my mother, girlfriend or sister” and after 15 minutes of saying not interested I was told by the tout: “Americans waste money on travel and everything, please give some to me”. Shortly thereafter my “free” tourguide told me, when I said I didn’t want to buy his soap stone (or was it marble as he claimed?) elephant, that “To say you have no money is an insult to England, all England has money”. I am sure the recent recession hit workers would love that sentiment.
It is also shown in that all sites have 2 prices: Nationals (~Rs10) and Foreigners (~Rs250-Rs750). 40 Rupees (Rs) is approx 1 Canadian dollar. Of course there is no passport check to determine this, as I am white.
This is, of course, not true of all people here at all. Many of the people I have met including our hired driver Sitesh, a hotel manager Mohan and one of our cab drivers Anil were extremly friendly, not for money at all, but for curiousity about who we are and why we wanted to see their wonderful country. Of course we were also paying them for a service, it could have been like a prostitute “enjoying” sex with a john… I doubt it, just saying.
Where this really hits you is that we do treat money poorly. We flaunt our huge houses and expensive cars. Take one of our waiters, who essentially waited on us hand-and-foot for 2 meals, offered to make us breakfast whenever we wanted, constantly checked we had enough water, beer, food as well as gave us travel and site tips. I gave him a Rs100 tip ($2.50ish) and told him we really appreciated his service and he pressed it to his forhead as a sign of respect and smiled like I haven’t seen in a long time. If you dropped a Toonie in the trash would you even look for it? What about in a lake, down a crack in a deck, or a toilet? A European soccer player just got signed for £90million a year that is Rs138million a week. The most expesnive hotel we had which is 4-5 star with a pool and restaurant/bar, free pickup upon arrival, internet included, 24 hour security cost Rs2000. He could stay every night in this (essentially luxury) hotel for 19 years on one weeks salary. Makes me think…

2) An obvious statement or the word “Hello” followed by a noun can start a conversation
 - The Taj Ganj is made up of 5 buildings. The Taj Mahal is dead center and massive and white, the other 4 are flanked on the left and right and dark red. Andrew and I were walking up the path towards the Taj Mahal and decided to turn right to see the other buildings first, a kind “guide” stopped us and said “Sirs, the Taj Mahal is that way”… Well thank you! It really wasn’t clear in any of the millions of articles and pamphlets and documentaries what exactly the Taj Mahal looked like! We really got turned around on the 200m straight ahead walk!
Also we constanly hear “Hello, rickshaw?” or “Hello, fruit juice?”. imagine if every one did this, life would be easy. It cuts the BS for sure! “Hello, date?” Would be a normal pick up line, “Hello, dying” would be indication you are choking on a chicken bone. Life would be so easy!
This has happened to us countless times so far. Apparently stating the obvious or repeating the name of whatever product is in front of you, is necessary for some tourists, and Andrew and I are way ahead of the game by buying a guidebook and having eyes.

3) We are always lost
 - Standing means we’re lost, reading signs means we’re lost, looking at a map means we’re lost, scratching our asses means we’re lost,being a tourist means we’re lost…
In reality this is actually a little refreshing. In England if an obvious tourist is stopped looking at their map in 4 different angles a Londoner (and now I) would just plow over them. Here they actually care: Most people genuinely want to help. In fact we had 3 people stop the other day to ask where we were going while waiting for a bus. One man even stayed and verified in native tongue that we had the right one. People here love to help. Sometimes (as in point 1) the intentions are poor, but in general they know we are in a strange country and want to make us feel comfortable.

4) Everything will work out
 - All scientists in Chaos Theory research need to live here! This country seems to thrive on being chaotic. There are people, cars, cows, honking and construction everywhere. There is something truly beautiful in that it works. No matter how much noise or how much confusion there is, it always works out. There is no need for a watch in India. Buses come when they do, train times appear to be estimates. The western world relies so much on time and the pressures of being “on time”. If a train is 2 minutes late in England an apology announcement is made. Here if the train shows up you’ll be happy. I absolutely love this. Check out times at hotels are approximate, there are no real restrictions on breakfast/lunch/dinner menus in restaurants, if you want to nap and are driving a transport, you pull over as far as you can and lay a mattress under your trailer and sleep (seriosuly, I saw this).
In the end everything is “No problem”. Here I am in a strange country with little English in some parts and I doubt my blood pressure has every been lower.

5) People can help people
 - A study was once done on some religion students. They were told they were having a 2 part interview, but due to a booking mistake the rooms were in 2 seperate buildings seperated on the same street. I forget the specifics, but essentially they were “programmed” with the Bible story about helping a hurt man in a road. Half were then told they were really early for part 2 of the interview and half were told they were late. Between the buildings a man was put on the sidewalk pretending to be injured. A small percentage of the “early” students stopped to help and almost none of the “late” students did. This is India vs the western world.
We all know that traffic rules are basically guidelines here, but if you choose to run a red at an intersection, go ahead, just stop if a car is coming towards you and let them go first. Honking here, while it can be used for anger, for the most part is actually courtesy: It lets a biker or truck driver know your behind them and passing. We got in a traffic jam in Agra heading towards the Taj Mahal. Some folks from the shops came out and started directing cars to make 3-point turns without hitting one another. We saw a cyclist fall off his bike and then dozens of locals run to him to help.
We all have this capability.

I have loved every second of this experience. The train fiasco which I didn’t detail here, but will later, the sketchy light show we attended, our hotel down a back alley of some market that you couldn’t see down, the bus ride on a bus without any English words/speakers on it. Everything. This country has taught me a lot already. It has shown me some things that we really do have wrong and some things I wish India would adopt from us. After just 2 weeks here I am convinced that everyone should come here and witness this for themselves.

Is it McDonald's?

Enjoying it while I can

In fact quite a bit, but let’s step back for a second. How many times have you felt like you were wasting time? Seemed like you were doing something insignificant? Your actions have no relevance to your future goals?

In this season on “How [...]]]> What do a typewriter and Germany have to do with Twitter?

In fact quite a bit, but let’s step back for a second. How many times have you felt like you were wasting time? Seemed like you were doing something insignificant? Your actions have no relevance to your future goals?

In this season on “How I Met Your Mother” there have been a few reflections of this sort. For instance “What would have happened had I taken that cab?” or “What would have changed had I not been on that street corner at that time?”.  The point that these statements make is quite simply that life is not a series of achievements or milestones, it is a series of interlocked microseconds where the affect of the previous billions and trillions are placed on the next infinitesimal.

Don’t believe me? Think about something fairly significant in your life. Today is my 4th anniversary with the company I work for. But how did I ever get this job? I heard about my company through a guest speaker in a course at UoG, i was introduced by the professor who I had known from a previous course, I only took that previous course because I had a choice of 2 electives and I had several friends in that course, I had made those friends from living in South Residence. In theory I could even pull this back farther as to why did I chose UoG, or Computer Science for that matter and that takes me back until the age of about 12, probably further. So an action that at the time may have been considered insignificant has resulted in me working for a company where I travel the world, get paid to do something I enjoy and work with a fantastic group of people. Some may say I am stretching it, but am I?

About 3 winters ago I had taken a day off of work to do some errands, Christmas shopping, and a few things for the fam. I woke up a little later than normal and went to have breakfast, out of milk for cereal I made eggs. i showered dressed and went down to my car. I got all the way down to my car and realized I forgot my phone, so I went back up. As I came out of my parking lot, as I was used to doing for work I turned left. About a city block went by before I realized I should have turned right, I started looking for a place to turn around when a police officer pulled in behind me and politely gave me a speeding ticket. Other than the obvious fact that the real blame is on me speeding…  Can I blame the meeting of me and this officer on me taking the longer time to make eggs than a simple bowl of cereal? The reason the milk was empty escapes me now, as at the time it was an insignificant detail. What about forgetting my cellphone? That added time to my delay? Couldn’t my vacation day have been on a different day?  Why was I at that intersection at that time on that day?

Twitter was limited to 140 characters for the highly publicized reason that SMS Text messaging standards is 160 characters, and Twitter allows 20 letters for a username. But why are text messages 160 characters? In the mid 80s a communications researcher working on a project to replace the pager sat at a typewriter and typed several common sentences he would have used his new gadget for. He found that almost all those sentences where less than 160 characters. He deemed that sufficient. When cellphones adopted this, bandwidth was slow and very tight, so they stuck with this to reduce overhead, and now that bandwidth is relatively cheap and plentiful we still use a non-scientific 80s limitation in a highly capable technology.

So when professors say that that the text message is ruining the way kids speak, perhaps we should blame that German researcher and his typewriter? Or we should blame the guy who hired him to research, or perhaps we should blame some other seemingly insignificant action that happened well before the 80s?

The problem is that this is all hindsight, who could know that me being stranded in a pub one evening would lead to me befriending a person who 2 years later is taking a trip with me to India? Who knew that by casually mentioning to my former boss I like to travel it would result in a series of events that moved me to England for 2.5+ years and counting?

I can think of so many examples in my life.  Most I cannot even trace back because the moments were so fleeting, but realizing this just gives another reason why you need to go with the flow of life, don’t try and control everything, don’t fret about spilling a coffee or tripping on a sidewalk because who knows: That action may lead you closer to your dreams.

Today’s edition is [...]]]> A recent bit of feedback from a friend and fellow blogger is that my posts lack a certain graphical appeal. I therefore have decided to introduce a recurring feature to this site where I use the power of my Blackberry’s camera to bring you interesting things I encounter on my day-to-day adventures.

Today’s edition is Silly Signs:

An interesting advertisement. I saw this in my local train station. Apparently a very hip dog (hip due to the cool specs) has somehow made it to the Taj Mahal and realized he needs a passport.I, of course, would encourage all travelers to sort out passports before going to see India, but each to their own.I am not sure what is more odd. The fact he has 1 ear, a face shaped like an arrow or that he has a camera around his neck, but yet no opposable thumbs to click the button. I am not sure who decided this advertisement would work, but smoking some of that crack might be fun. I will make a note, that I have no idea what this is advertising.

On my recent trip to Germany I had a layover in Zurich, this sign was seen on the shuttle bus to my plane.Apparently in Switzerland it is not only encouraged that you smoke on a shuttle bus, but that you smoke several different types of tobacco.However the artist did forget to paint the smoke lines on the pipe, so maybe I should just carry an un-lit pipe Sherlock Holmes style. For a country that smokes more cigarettes in an hour than most countries do in a year, I guess it makes sense that you are allowed to have one last sweet taste of nicotine before the 1 hour 20 minute flight from Zurich to Heathrow.

That is all for now. I hope that this satisfies the apparent lust for imagery my readers have.

Since I stated posting blog entries I have received [...]]]> I could spend a lot of time reviewing each absurdity of this book, but alas I like to branch out more. Instead I think in my final reflection I’ll finish with why I believe Mr. Keen has this sense of reality that I do not share.

Since I stated posting blog entries I have received many comments such as “Stoss, you really think about the world in a fucked up way.” And I agree. I tend to think about things differently. I am not near arrogant enough to think my opinion is the only one, or necessarily correct. To paraphrase a quote from The Truman Show _{(highly under-rated movie)}: “We all live in the reality with which we are presented.”

About 3 months ago I went on a date with a smart, pretty, 20-something professional in the bio-medical field who lives by herself away from her family. On the surface you might think we are very similar. We are both white-collar workers, we are independent, well traveled and have the means to sustain ourselves. The topic came up as to how often we order take away. I said not that often, usually just Friday night curry or something. She gasped! “Once a week?! That is really often!”

At the time we had a quick laugh and moved on, but the above story is directly related to this book. I live in a reality where once a week takeout is not only normal, it is considered infrequent. That being said, lately I also live in a world where if I am not on 4 or 6 airplanes in a month I consider it “downtime”.

The point I am trying to make is that in Mr. Keen’s reality the Internet is the culprit for the downfall of society. I am sure he truly believes that and I wouldn’t fault him on it. In my reality the Internet is one of, if not the most important technological advances ever and has potential to propel society in directions we cannot even fathom yet.

The later part of the book has a couple themes. One is human behaviour and the other is the disadvantages to an all electronic society.

Keen blames sex addiction on the vast amount of porn on the Internet. Sex addiction? The only purpose for us to exist is for sex. Monogamy, humility, these are man-made concepts. Sex addiction is fundamental to our existence. The fact birth control, condoms, abortion were invented just helps us to not over-populate the shit out of this planet. Just think, if they diverted the attention give to the industry of preventing pregnancy to a field like cancer, how would this world be different?

Our realities did meet in a few way though. Keen talks about the information gathering on the net and the potentially disastrous effects it could have if it leaks. I agree. I find it very spooky when I log into Facebook in Germany and my ads are in German, or when I land in type in www.google.com in Switzerland and get directed to www.google.ch.

What if every search, every online purchase and every website you ever visited was somehow displayed to the world? Would you be embarrassed? Would losing the expected anonymity of the Internet be detrimental to your life?

Now the big brother view is that the Information Superhighway has CCTV cameras at every metre to watch you, track you and record your every move. The truth is that this is nothing new. Credit card companies have been data mining your information for decades to find patterns and anomalies to help them prevent credit card fraud. For the most part these measures are there to help you. It lets Google know when you search for Mustang, do you mean horse or car. It lets Amazon recommend books to you to save you searching or when you are stuck for a choice. But as I discussed earlier, all technologies have the ability to be used for nefarious purposes.

How is it different that you have a subscription to a gardening magazine and that magazine sells your address to gardening supply stores so they can send you mail, than Facebook putting up a “singles in the UK” ad on my page because I am listed as single and living in the UK?

The ironic part of all of this discussion is that at the end of bashing amateurs, saying that we can have no idea when someone isn’t a paid professional on a subject if they are telling the truth or lying, the author admits in the final pages of his book that he himself is an amateur, that this is first book and he had to rely on several others in writing it. Think about that for a bit.

Mr. Keen clearly sees the Internet as something vastly different than any previous technology. I do not. I see it as an advancement, sort of like VHS->DVD->Blue Ray.  If Keen took the time to think about this in the grand scheme of our society and not in the individual case studies (The Internet poker player who robs a bank to pay off his debt, or the German teenagers who faked a political message on YouTube etc) he would see we are no worse off at all. We have just transitioned to a new form of culture, economy and values, not destroyed them at all.

Bottom line: I am glad I read this book. I hated it page after page, but sometimes it takes something that you hate for you to reflect on why you like something.

Swine Flu World Wide Stats

This picture was in the UK morning paper. Notice that the only place that has any deaths in it is [...]]]> I mentioned briefly in my last post about the Swine Flu. And today I read that Air Transat and other airlines have suspended flights! Has this world gone mad?!

Swine Flu World Wide Stats

This picture was in the UK morning paper. Notice that the only place that has any deaths in it is Mexico? Yes, the US A just confirmed its first death this morning, but since I have been typing (According to word press 80 words), 43 people have died of cancer and 39 by communicable diseases! 152 deaths in 2 weeks in Mexico is not a significant number!

Now, please don’t take this as “Go out and lick sick people’s faces”, all I am saying is be reasonable! This is same problem i wrote about in “Tazed and Confused“, people don’t understand reasonable precaution versus gross over-reaction!

I am flying in the next coming weeks to Canada (13 cases), the US (65) & Germany (3). And now for my favourite part: Math!

So, statistically 0% of the population. Last year globally 1600 people died by falling out of bed. Including 450 people in the US. At that rate the Swine Flu would have to be in action in the US for 1 death every 2 weeks for about 17 years!

I’ll take my chances.

We join the book with a new hypothesis from Mr Keen. Because some people lie on the Internet, we cannot be sure if anything is truth and therefore it is all invalid.  Solid idea. Applying this to elsewhere in the world: Because airplanes crash no one should fly, because some people [...]]]> Chapter 3 – 5:

We join the book with a new hypothesis from Mr Keen. Because some people lie on the Internet, we cannot be sure if anything is truth and therefore it is all invalid.  Solid idea. Applying this to elsewhere in the world: Because airplanes crash no one should fly, because some people kill people all people kill people…

It is also the start of what appears to be this author’s favourite way to make a point… putting several questions in a row at the end of a paragraph to make you “think” about his ideas, as opposed to proving his ideas.

Does anyone remember Bree or lonleygirl15 as she was known on the web? He uses this interesting example of a new type of entertainment as an example that: “We’re never sure if what we read or see is what it seems”. Is a videoblog of a 16 year old girl who turned out to be an 18 year old actress really the best example of falsehood that we can find? How about the current Swine Flu “epidemic”, in 1st world countries no one has even died from this “epidemic”, in fact the only deaths have been in Mexico and of the 150 possible cases, only 20 swine flu deaths have even been confirmed! But wait! The fact we are in an epidemic and should be panicking all across the world is something paid, non-amateur writers are discussing, guess I better go by my $0.02 face mask! That will guarantee my health!

The next 2 chapters were sad. Mr. Keen tells us the sad story of his favourite record store going out of business and blaming it entirely on iTunes, and illegal file sharing. The sadness of his friends who will miss the choice and wisdom of the employees and how nothing will ever be the same… You know what? GET OFF MY LAWN. Things change. The vast majority of people prefer to pick and choose their songs. And in fact, this is nothing new… remember mix tapes? Isn’t that a collection of favourite songs, akin to an iPod play list? We have simply made the transportation mode more efficient. It is sad that the we won’t have the wisdom of a music geek’s opinion on music, but hell we get Ebert’s opinion on movies every day and ignore him.

Let’s think of the radio. Here is a technology that music companies embrace, but yet isn’t that really delivering their artist’s art to billions of people for “free”? The music companies found a way to make that profitable. Keen pulls out of his ass the beautiful (and smelly) estimate of 20 billion songs being illegally downloaded in a year. Coincidentally, I this comes from the RIAA’s wonderfully amazing calculation that 40 songs are illegally downloaded for every song legally paid for on the Internet. Let’s do some math. The current belief is 24% of people in the world have some sort of internet connection. 6 billion people on the planet, therefore 1.44 billion people have internet. That means every person who has access to the internet anyhere in the world has downloaded 14 illegal songs and ~ 1/3 of a song legally. Plausible? Keen even refers to the legal download industry’s $1.1 billion a year business as “paltry”!! We live in a world where $1.1 billion is paltry? What is paltry is the number of companies to jump into this space! At $1.1bn if 3 companies each took 33% of the market they would be $400million companies. That means all 3 companies would be on Forbe’s list of the 400 most profitable companies! Hardly paltry.

None-the-less I am not condoning illegal activities, but the truth is that all technology can be copied and shared. The Internet simply provides a convenient way of doing so. As we have seen so many times before, fighting the Internet is futile. Embrace the technology and you can share your piece of a $1.1bn business space.

His next topic is of course video. Same argument really. A comment I really enjoyed was his quote: “Blockbuster [is] already hedging their bets by planning downloading services of their own”. Hedging bets?! I call that a smart CEO who is making good decisions. Give that guy a $90mil bonus!

There is a common theme in this book so far. Besides the fear-mongering, Internet is out to kill all things attitude, it is that everything is better if the person is professional at it. ie. I am no good as a writer because I don’t write as a profession. The entertainers on YouTube cannot provide good entertainment as they are not professionals. He deals in so many absolutes. I tend to believe this world isn’t absolute. I keep saying adapt to technology, but in reality I am aware this isn’t possible, and definitely isn’t a short term move. The point is that amateurs have their place in our society. Some of the best magic, juggling, entertainers I have seen were street side performers in squares and parks. That doesn’t mean they should all start websites and YouTube channels. Amateurism is a title and not an indication of skill. Let’s compare Susan Boyle to WIlliam Hung. Both of them are stars and relative amateurs, but I think that is too easy of a point to have to spell out.

Lately a phenomenon has taken off like many of the fads of the 80s we all love so much. Starting with the BBS systems in the late 70s and through the 90s we have had this intrinsic need to network with people at any distance via computer. With the web becoming more accessible, network [...]]]> Preface:

Lately a phenomenon has taken off like many of the fads of the 80s we all love so much. Starting with the BBS systems in the late 70s and through the 90s we have had this intrinsic need to network with people at any distance via computer. With the web becoming more accessible, network speeds getting faster and the advent of many advanced web technologies we have seen phases like Classmates.com, Bebo, MySpace, Facebook and we are now looking at Twitter and the even weirder Omegle where you can (advantageously?) talk to a total stranger.

An ongoing trend throughout this advancement has been the Blog. Starting as Usenet threads and advancing to Weblogs and containing everything from political updates to fart counters, there has never been an outlet for expression that has been utilized by so many people. Useful or not, they are a social medium that won’t soon disappear.

Now, I am the very first to admit that many of these are time wasters and marketing gimmicks. I am also the first to admit that many people live too much of their lives collecting MySpace friends and looking up old highschool classmates that they would never speak to in any other capacity. And finally I will admit that there are heinous and illegal uses for each of these technologies. BUT, and let me be very clear on this, that doesn’t mean that they do not have a place in the social paradigm that any individual wishes to maintain.

And this brings me to my Easter weekend trip to a bookstore to find something to enjoy on my upcoming slew of flights. In my search for Malcolm Gladwell’s new Outliers, I found a fluorescent orange cover with the caption “how blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values“. What a strong statement that is. Not only grouping together the 60+ million blogs as 1 entity, but comparing them to the pre-teen obsession that is MySpace and the completely different medium that YouTube boasts. Immediately Andrew Keen had grabbed my interest, as I am sure he intended to, and I decided that “the cult of the amateur” was a book I needed to read.

Now, I like to think I have an open mind. I enjoy a debate, and am always willing to try and understand why people have a certain point of view, regardless if I agree with it. And in fact Mr. Keen even reminds his readers to keep an open mind as he has been described in various media as everything from “The Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley”  to “The Martin Luther King of the Internet counterreformation”.  Intrigued yet?

You will notice I have labeled this post as ‘part 1′, I have done so for the following reason: Never in my adult life have I ever put down a non-fiction book before reading it through. I am currently on page 45, half way through the 2nd chapter and have already considered doing so. This man takes generalizations and blatantly false information and is trying to sell them as the demise of society. Since I do not want to break my streak, I vow to read this book and write about any interesting subjects I can find, positive or negative I will try and form an objective opinion to post here. Today it is mostly negative…

The Forward to Chapter 1:

Mr. Keen continually refers to all blogists as monkeys and relates blog entries/writers to “T. H. Huxley’s infinite monkey theorem”. (The theory that “If you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters they will eventually write a ‘Great American novel’”) Aside from the fact that it has been proven that Huxley did not come up with this phrase at all, blogists are in no way random and their intent is not to come up with the ‘Great American Novel’. Blogging is a medium to project thoughts, express opinions, dabble with poetry/art, offload stress, among many other things, but not on that list is any intent to write a piece of work that will be recognized by a publisher, let alone compete with Shakespeare or Fitzgerald.

He then goes on a rant about Wikipedia and how with no editors, no reporters and no expertise in reporting necessary to join: (I am quoting this as it is so preposterous)

It’s the blind leading the blind – infinite monkeys providing infinite information for infinite readers, perpetuating the cycle of misinformation and ignorance.

What?! Firstly, it is not the intent of Wikipedia to educate. Wikipedia is very clear that it is edited by anyone and no credentials are necessary. If people are misusing Wikipedia for education instead of entertainment that isn’t the fault of Wikipedia or a cause of social breakdown. In fact it is the exact opposite! Social breakdown is causing people to mistake entertainment for news. This has nothing to do with Wikipedia! Our education system has taught laziness and hasn’t updated to the new age we are in. Education has to change to support the media available. Like in my Economics class using the Internet to gather real time statistical data about the world stock markets to learn real world examples of market trends as opposed to using Wikipedia to find vague averages, or Google to find Forbes’ lists.

Mr. Keen also claims that every post on Craigslist for free is taking away paid jobs at newspapers and that every Wikipedia reader is taking away money from Brittania… Again, setting aside that I am sure most local papers won’t post a request for a hot MMF ass orgy, and Encyclopedia Brittania contains no episode guide list for Futurama, I guess my small and simple point is that the audiences aren’t the same! I am sure the Venn Diagram looks like the MasterCard logo, but the overlap is not significant enough to impact large organizations like New York Times or Grolier! The decline in the circulation of newspapers and the sale of encyclopedias is attributed to the fact that people don’t read the morning newspaper, and don’t want a bookshelf of facts from A-Z that has the weight of a locomotive! Say what you will about the fact that people work 20 hours a day, check their Blackberries non-stop and require up-to-the-second news sent via txt msg, it is where we are. Adapt to it! Utilize the technology that is here to stay, don’t complain that it is stealing from you. Yes, video killed the radio star, and DVD bitch slapped VHS, no one at Sony yelled about technology changing, they made a different product! And comedians, musicians, newsmakers are more popular and wealthy then they were!

So, did you make it through that? I apologize for the long entry.  I am sorry that I am destroying our economy, culture and values, but as long as I continue to read this book I will do my best to keep that destruction down to the minimum… oh and yes, I get the irony that I am reviewing a book whose thesis is anti-blog in a blog…

When I do this I do not turn on the 57 fluorescent lights that line our ceiling so I can sit at my desk in the very back [...]]]> Sometimes I get to work before anyone else, not because I am overly keen, but I live an 8 minute walk away… Pretty hard to blame traffic.

When I do this I do not turn on the 57 fluorescent lights that line our ceiling so I can sit at my desk in the very back of the office and work. The morning sun is usually enough light for me to find my seat and turn on my computer.

I have been doing this for 3 years and yet my coworkers are constantly surprised that I am sitting in the dark! Is it such a novelty for me to not want to bombard my eyes with blue-tinged, glowing chemicals at 8:30am?

On this note of turning lights off, recently “Earth Hour” seems to be deemed, by the media at least, a success. But really… Was this event really a success?

I was in a meeting the same day as Earth Hour occurred. We came into the room turned out the lights so that we could view the projector and held the entirety of the meeting in the darkened room. When the meeting was done, we got up to leave and the host of the meeting turned the room lights back on and closed the door to the now empty room. Why? What is our obsession with having everything lit up to its fullest potential?  I walk through cities at night and see rows of 50+ story buildings with every floor brightly shining into the night! Even if there is some one on every floor, is it necessary that every single light be on? The linked Wiki page says the TO saw a 15% decrease in electricity consumption during that hour. Now I am no expert on energy, but if all I had to do to decrease consumption by 15% was shut a light switch off for one hour, and energy is a big concern for me, can’t this be done every night of the year?!

As my former roommates know I do tend to prefer darkness, probably my inner geek coming out, but I don’t think it is this preference that makes me think that Earth Hour (note the highlight) is a ridiculous concept. It is the fact that turning off a light when a room is empty is common sense that makes me come to this conclusion! All throughout Europe they have sensors that turn off hallways lights in hotels and business when empty, and turn on lights as soon as doors open. Even our office building in England has that, and we are a small building. These are not expensive tools, and according to Earth Hour, can save 10s to 100s of MWs every hour!

Regardless, you have to admit that organizing a global project to save sporadic amounts of energy for one hour in 88 out of 195 countries is not an efficient way to tackle this problem. Declared success or not, the real problem Earth Hour was trying to address wasn’t even scratched. How can you make the smallest dent in a problem by changing your behaviour 0.01% of the time (1 hour out of an entire year). Let’s put it this way: I want to lose weight using exercise. Using the Earth Hour Methodology® I only need to exercise 1.15 minutes in a week.  Sounds good to me, but how many health experts would advocate that as a solution?

Look, I am not an environmentalist. I try to apply common sense to my daily life. Don’t throw wrappers on the ground, reuse shopping bags, use reusable containers for leftovers etc.  So before the environmentalists say I am dismissing the effectiveness of the awareness Earth Hour spread, all I am saying is: Take all the effort you put into Earth Hour; The viral Tweets and Facebook groups, the banners, the government lobbying and put that towards a longer term solution and the Earth would benefit more.

BTW: This is all assuming that the Earth benefits from this… But that is another blog entry

Google Street View has recently come under fire when trying to photograph a specific town in England.

Now the camera has been used by the public for about 100 years. Over [...]]]> As was my view in this entry of my blog, I can now provide even further proof of this ridiculous world we live in.

Google Street View has recently come under fire when trying to photograph a specific town in England.

Now the camera has been used by the public for about 100 years. Over those years there have been some drastic changes that now have evolved into digital pictures. Pictures that don’t physically exist, but that can be immediately transferred around the world. This evolved into Google Street View: The ability to see, given a postal code, an area in pictures.

Every single article I have ever read on this topic includes some form of this quote:

But it has been accused of invading people’s right to privacy. Those left embarrassed include customers filmed leaving sex shops and a man caught being sick in the street.

In fact some articles even claim that divorces have been filed, which of course seems really ridiculous…

What the people in this particular village are now discovering is the same phenomenon that I spoke to before: By making a scene you are in the end screwing yourself over. Also known as the Streisand Effect.

Google Street View is not an invasion of privacy. Why? Privacy is the ability to keep things about you private to you or a group of people. The front of your house is not a private matter. I am willing to concede that the ability to view a streamlined picture of an entire street could be used for evil, but in the same token so can phone books! Millions of telemarketers use phone books to call you every single day. All a phone book is is a collection of every phone number alphabetically for a town. All Street View is is a collection of house fronts for a village in the order they appear on the street!

All technologies have the ability to be used for undesirable purposes. Do you think it is a coincidence that when you are listed as single on Facebook ads for singles in your area appear in the toolbar? No! This site is data mining what you upload to try and entice you to buy something. 20 years ago a company would spend millions on researching people to figure out who was single, what age range some one was in, what their favourite movies are, and now we are voluntarily typing that data into an international database!? For Christ’s sake there are marketing people who have wet dreams about this sort of thing!

CCTV is all over the UK. I am on camera every single day. There are people everyday being caught coming out of sex shops, vomiting in the streets and yet someone taking a static, let me repeat, STATIC photo of your house is an invasion of privacy? Are you kidding me? I walk past houses everyday, I see though the front windows and sometimes see a family having dinner, sometimes see the tv on. Is it really private knowledge that people eat dinner and watch tv? Hell, a friend once told me she was coming home from work and her neighbour had the blinds open watching hardcore porn!

The bottom line here is that irrationality and un-education about a technology or a cause makes the situation worse. If all these people did was read Google’s Policy, they could perfectly quietly ask to not have their pictures on the site, and Google will comply as several hundred people have done and no one would have known. (Coincidentally, just as you can do with the phone book)

Unfortunately my house is not on Google Street View, so I cannot show you my lovely flat and let you invade my “privacy”.

Woman – “I work for Amnesty International and they are doing a £27,000 ($50,000 CDN) [...]]]> Yesterday after a meeting in London and a couple of pints I was approached by a 20-something woman who asked if I had a moment. I certainly did have a moment, so here is our (annotated and slightly abridged) conversation:

Woman – “I work for Amnesty International and they are doing a £27,000 ($50,000 CDN) charity drive to raise money. Do you feel that women being beaten and raped is a problem?”

Now, at this point what could I have said? I mean, honestly, did she want me to say “no”? If this was some religion I probably would have, just because it is fun to debate with religion, however I played the innocent and said “yes”.

Woman – “Were you aware that up until recently it was not a criminal offense for a woman to be beaten unless the woman filed a formal complaint? That means that a man could beat a woman in front of a police officer and the officer could do nothing about it.”

This I had a hard time believing. I truly believe if an officer was watching you being punched by someone he would help you, but then again this is England. However I nodded politely and looked “shocked”.

Woman – “Amnesty International was instrumental in stopping this and now abused woman have better avenues for protecting themselves.”

I could have corrected her and said: “No, they have better avenues for prosecuting/removing the abuse once it is done”, however I let her continue.

Woman – “What are you in Leicester Square for?”

Me – “I had a meeting earlier today, and had a couple pints with a coworker and I am now waiting to meet a friend for dinner.”

Woman –  ”Interesting you say pints…”

Interesting? That isn’t interesting, it is a loose segue into your question about how I spend my money… oh and also if you were to ask ask any man on a Wednesday night in England what he was doing, the word “pints” is bound to be in there.

“… because for just the price of 1.5 pints a month you can support this important cause.”

Two things here:

1. “What cause? You have told me that you already “solved” the only problem you mentioned to me.”
2. “But then I would have 1.5 pints less each month, you bitch!”

I let this slide, and I was glad because this is where it gets fun!

Me – “Do you have some literature I could read on this topic? I am not really familiar with Amnestity International…” ( A bit of a lie really, but she doesn’t know) “… and I would like to learn more”

Woman – “Yes, and for just £0.20 a day you can receive all the details on our organization”

Me – “I don’t think I will be donating today, but I would love to read more on…”

Woman – “Well, due to the cost we cannot just give out literature.”

Me – (jaw dropped, a charity that doesn’t want to promote themselves?) “Ok, do you have a website I could view?”

And here my friends was my favourite part of the conversation… I want to point out that this next line is the factual quote that this woman said to me:

Woman – “By the time you view our website 260 women in the UK will be raped.”

I want to pause here to apologize to those exactly 260 women that were raped between yesterday at 6pm and today at 9:30am. I really am sorry that you had to be raped due to my neglect in not donating 1.5 pints to this cause. I wish you all the best and hope you receive the treatment and care you deserve.

My immediate response was this:

Me – “Sorry, but really you can say that about anything: 1250 African children will starve by the time I view your website, 180 Big Macs will be consumed in Brighton by the time I view your website… That really isn’t an argument for you not to give me the web address.”

She of course was not amused at my apparent disdain for her attempt at guilt. It was at this point I realized this woman was working on commision and that the facade of actually caring for these women was replaced with the greed for her portion of the £27,000 Amnesty has for this endevour.

Here is where I smiled and wished her good luck and we parted ways. It is sad that the only mechanism this woman had was a guilt trip about raped women to try and convince me her charity was worth supporting. It is also sad she tried to con me out of 1.5 pints, so she could get money to buy herself pints.

For more information on Amnesty, I googled this: http://www.amnesty.org/

If we think about it all things started from an idea, from the computer, to the spoon, to the wheel. All [...]]]> Where do ideas come from? Earlier tonight I was trying to think of a topic to write about and even started two articles (now saved in my draft folder). The ideas never fully formed.

If we think about it all things started from an idea, from the computer, to the spoon, to the wheel. All things we use on a day-to-day basis come from some initial idea. Some evolve in a positive manner; remember the first microwaves that weighed 100 lbs and had the capacity for 2 raw eggs? Some evolve in the wrong direction; Beta giving way to VHS comes to mind.

But not until I stopped thinking did the idea for this article arrive, perhaps that is the key: Ideas come when your mind isn’t working!

Perhaps Edison, who holds over 1000 patents in the US alone, never actually thought? His mind just came up with an idea while he was zoned out on his porch and he was skilled enough to recognize it and execute on it. Maybe this is why ideas come so rapidly when you are stoned? (not that I would know anything about that)

I think what separates “great” visionaries from others is not the idea itself, but the ability to execute the idea into a product that can perform the task it is meant to and do it in a way that is effective for the audience it is intended for. This could be some sort of consumer market, but in the case of this blog, the audience is you. My job as an “author” is to take an idea and write something that entertains and/or captures your minds for the brief few paragraphs I type.

But if that is the case, how does one measure the success of the execution? My blog certainly won’t get the millions of hits as something like slashdot.org or engadget.com. It could be argued that financial gain is a measure of success, but some of the greatest ideas in history haven’t resulted in the earning of much money at all, at least not for 1 or a concentrated group of people.

I choose to take my ideas and write them into a blog, others take their ideas and build an object to sell, and others take their ideas to the stage as stand up comedians. Each of these methods of execution are just as valid and satisfying to the idea holder and to their intended audience(s).

So execute your ideas how you want, and forget about the measurement of success, take a chance, write our thoughts, speak your mind, build that automated-booger-flicker or gold-plated laptop you’ve been dreaming about. The ride is more important than the destination!

So, did I execute? Probably not, it is 1 in the morning…

Hello Everyone! The page has changed significantly and hopefully I now can maintain this more. I have moved over my favourite posts from my old blog and will be perfecting the scheme of this webpage as  I discover new and wonderful things about WordPress.

Stoss

But one thing I don’t understand is: Why the hell do they not change the way they taste? Think about it… if a [...]]]> Natural selection is an interesting subject. I was thinking, many animals have developed all sorts of mechanisms to protect themselves or to detect other predators: camouflage skin, heightened smell, night sight etc.

But one thing I don’t understand is: Why the hell do they not change the way they taste? Think about it… if a chicken tasted like “stink bomb”, no one would eat it! If beef had the smell of melted tar,  no predators would even go near a cow!

And on a side note, why the hell do chickens not get a fancy name for their meat? Cows are beef, deer is venison, and hell… pigs have ham, pork AND bacon!!! Why is chicken so boring?

Also, why is pork the “other white meat”? Who decided that pork was less important than chicken? Was it discovered AFTER chicken? Hell with 3 names for the meat, you would think that it was more important than chicken! This leads me to my existential question for the week: Which came first the chicken or the pig?

What you [...]]]> As always I have an opinion: The recent Virginia situation as before when this has occurred is being brought out to be a sign of the decline of society. This is because it is easy to point to a moron with a gun and blame him for all the fear in the world.

What you never hear is that the decline of society is the cause, not the affect. And this is where I step in.

We now live in a world where a 16 yearold girl with her tits popping out of her waterbra can talk on one cell while txting on a another and last night was rammed harder than King George’s 12th century castle during the crusades by the highschool quarterback who eats E for breakfast alongside a 6-pack of fine 3% beer and a picture of the American flag which he gives the finger to for 3 hours a day. And few see anything wrong with that.

We now live a society where anyone (as the shooter did) can purchase a Glock and 50 rounds of ammunition and have it described by the store owner as “an unremarkable purchase”. And few see anything wrong with that.

We also live in a society where dozens of twisted, murderous Hollywood movies gross billions of dollars each year and yet the shooter now has two “twisted plays” he wrote posted on the internet as “proof” that he was psychotic. And few see anything wrong with that.

And, we live in a society where you shoot 32 people and CNN does 24-hour coverage of the “ongoing updates” including: What colour his toothbrush was, the MacDonald’s employee who served him a Big Mac just minutes before the shooting and the climax of the story:  The frowny face he used on MSN the night before to end his conversation with his German penpal. This guy got exactly what he craved: attention. And few see anything wrong with that.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not in anyway condoning or rationalizing shooting 32 people, but to have the chief of police and president of Virginia Tech stand on national TV and say that the shooter “was a loner” is just a sign that they would rather polish the knobs of a self-righteous group of spoiled brats and dismiss the sociopath as a nobody, loser, than address the fact that there is a large societal problem here.

Can stupidity be stopped? Of course not! And to think otherwise, is to disillusion yourself like the majority of the western world. It isn’t the fact we can stop it, it is the fact that we need to acknowledge it that is my concern. I have said it a million times, you cannot legislate against stupidity. It is impossible. If someone wants to do something dumb, whether it be to shove fireworks up their ass and light them, or kick a dog in front of a bus or shoot 32 people for no reason… they WILL. It is not a question of if, it is a question of when.

Stop feeding the fire with your insistence that only “loners” are capable of this type of massacre! This was a stupid, stupid act. In a society where we can accept drugs, alcohol, glorified media, depraved sex, horror and destruction as daily things that occur, do not try and convince me that a “loner” who was mad at his ex-girlfriend is the cause for decline in our society.