Staticfree Blog

This has been said many times, however I repeat these things here because they have made a difference in my life. They are not easy to do, but neither is changing one's life.

Fundamentally, these tips are about changing from a passive participant in the world (and in your life) to becoming an active participant. It is about getting on the other side of the screen and becoming a producer instead of simply a consumer.

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I do not believe in the Christian God. Most people I talk with probably know this and believe me to be an atheist, which is probably the most true classic religious affiliation that I have. However, I do believe in the value of having a strong set of morals with which one leads their life by - not any specific morals, mind you, just that they exist and be internally consistent. I strive towards personal betterment, revising my morals to more effectively be better in the future. Eventually I'll reach a moral low-energy state where I'll be able to live my life as I see fit, where it doesn't interfere with others.

This is what organized religions generally provide and what I dislike about most of them. The morals in most religions are out of date - they involve too much viral propagation and don't allow for personal moral growth.

That's why I like Discordanism: "It is my firm belief that it is a mistake to hold firm beliefs." It's a little hammer that breaks that annoying rock of morality that most religions have. Eventually most Discordians realize that it's actually humorous in nature and move on to having a nice, wholesome set of beliefs anyhow - just ones that are more practical.

So, on God: If she existed, I imagine she wouldn't want to be worshiped, prayed to, or be displayed piety. If there's a God, we can understand her as effectively as ants can understand a computer. We may reach the day when we can understand God, but until then we should just go about our lives, enjoying them, living and learning how to reach that ultimate state; God is a good goal, but not something to be obsessed with.

God's probably just a kid at a higher-level computer playing with the nifty fractal that is our universe.

Reading this article kicked my idea-generator into gear. The technology is here already for location-based games: interactive cellphone games which use the location-sensing mechanism on the phone to move the virtual character around a virtual realm. You are both a player in the real world, as well as the virtual.

Now, expand that idea some. How about take that to cinema? Make a story out of it. Combine that with flashmobbing and a net connection... what do you get? You get a group of people, armed with camera-and-GPS devices all congregating on a single site, perhaps a stage you set up or a performance you are doing.

Set up multiple such ones around a city; turn the city into your stage. Have people register their phone numbers to receive SMS messages telling them the new location after each micro-performance is done.

Make multiple locations at the same time and give different locations to different participants. What if they follow the crowd instead of their SMSs? You have a truly interactive audience and they are lost without your electronic guidance.

Is this in our future? If so, who would like to build it?

Paul Graham wrote an intriguing article on what you can't say. He shares some good thoughts on heresy and how cultures always seem to have heretical thoughts, even modern ones who often think they're beyond such things.[from Slashdot]

Matthew Haughey wrote up some interesting ideas for social software that doesn't seem to exist yet. A few ideas are based on social networks - one of which my coworker and I were actually playing with ourselves ("Geographical opinion systems" and potentially "Collaborative consumed media"). My co-worker's idea was based on using FOAF as the publishing format. We also pondered arbitrary ratings of entities, like restaurants or public restrooms (which could be tied to geographic locations).

In the shower, I was pondering relationships. As happens too frequently, I started pondering them in terms of other things, and this case - in terms of internet protocols. Yeah, I swear I'm not addicted to computers.

One night stands

This one's simple: UDP. It's an unreliable protocol where no permanent connection is established. You aren't even guaranteed a reply at all.

Relationship (significant other)

TCP/IP. You go through a bit of a dance to establish a connection (lots of hand shaking) and once you do, you've got a reliable connection. Even over long distances and through harsh networks you can have a reliable connection, although they're more apt to disconnect that way. When you're done with the connection, you say a few magic words and it's over; the port you reserved for it is then freed.

Polyamory

Multicasting. It's not widely supported, but some use it on a daily basis. Some think it's the future, while others think it has too much overhead. Some will try it out and realize that it's not for them, while others get very into it and often get swept away by it.

Flirting

nmap ;-)

(04:42:34) Brigitte: internet needs a peaceful quiet...

The Internet has become a sort of home for me. It's the one place (if you could even call it such) where I find my self returning to each day and falling asleep in. Like a good home, it's comforting to me in many regards - being able to communicate in various ways with my friends and lovers as though they were there. It's missing many things, but one particular one I've been wanting recently - quiet.

The real world is a subtractive environment: you have to actively do less in order to communicate less. You have to make the conscious decision to lay still to not communicate body language. Even then, the pattern and rate of your breathing, the state of your eyes, your facial expression, all say great deals about yourself.

Online, communication is additive. If you want to express yourself, there's a wall up that you squeeze your expression through. You must actively place words, actively create a web page, actively interact with your computer in order to communicate information. The only passive information in the electronic world is your chat status, your avatar. That, though, is ultimately controlled by you, so it is effectively additive.

Why note this distinction between additive and subtractive communication?

Silence.

In an additive world, silence is the norm. If there's nothing happening, then simply nothing is being directly communicated. There's no passive facial expression to show how someone is inside. You can't tell if someone is there and sharing the silence with you, or off playing a video game at top volume. In all the silence, there is no guaranteed lack of activity. You cannot share a silent moment with someone online for there is no silence.

Why is this important? Why does one need to have pure, unadulterated silence? It's a remarkably personal thing. We, as humans, pride ourselves on our accomplishments, on our creations, on our successes. But silence is the opposite of that. There is no activity there. A silence is a moment of reflection: a 4am lay-on-the-couch-and-ponder-the-universe silence. It's a time people can share together, intimate and isolated.

There is no easy way to give the Internet this capability. As noted, it's additive. You would have to literally see all that was happening and hear all that way playing on someone's computer to truly share such an intimate moment like this. Perhaps some things should simply be left to the reality and not recreated in an abstraction.

Every time I hear someone mentioning "balancing a checkbook" I realize that it's one of the many tedium tasks that I've managed to escape ever having to do. Technology has revolutionized my life in ways I don't even realize at times. Here are a few things which I've never had to do that my parents did, due to technology or modernization.

I have never:

Balanced a checkbook

Online banking and electronic bill payments pretty much got rid of this. I've written perhaps 10-15 checks in my life and they were mostly for rent and payment to friends. I'm still not entirely sure what it means, though I've got some notions and am glad I won't need to do it any time soon.

Gotten cut while shaving

The ads have some merit: never get cut again. Well, I haven't yet. Electric razors don't really cut, nor do the three-bladed ones; that's all I've ever used.

Sent taxes via postal mail

I've filed all my taxes electronically. This is definitely a good thing as it reduces the amount of people in the system considerably.

Used a typewriter for work

They're still used for filling out forms on occasion, which I've only ever done electronically (most of my College applications had magical type-in PDFs).

Sent a fax

OK, this is just a silly thing that I'm glad I never had to do. I've only heard bad things about fax machines, yet somehow a faxed signature is legally-binding. I don't get it.

Used a print encyclopedia

This is a bit of a lie, way back in my childhood, I would occasionally look through the one we had for fun. But I've never used a print encyclopedia for any real work.

What have your parents (or that generation) had to do that technology has saved you from?

I think I'm starting to feel the pulse. The Internet is a vast web of information exchange. It's far too large, even if one could manage to monitor everything, to really get a high-level overview of all the new data that's added to the web. Almost.

On that web there are many nodes that will digest and summarize the information flowing around/through them. There are also nodes that look for patterns, and extract meaning: a news site that is regularly updated, a blogger's site which has interesting links and ideas posted on it. Let's call each of these nodes "neurons". These neurons act as sensors for their environment: a blogger who complains about the weather, a news station that reports on a local crime. If they could be monitored, say via a standard protocol, one get a high-level view of the union of all the neurons monitored.

These neurons are not isolated. In fact, most of them will monitor other neurons, other information feeds, other events and generate output based on their observations. These information feeds, connecting neuron to neuron, could be paralleled with the brain's inter-neuron connective structures: "dendrites". Dendrites function by passing signals from neuron to neuron, creating a network of information flow.

What's the point of this metaphor? Well, it's nowhere near the density of a human brain, but each person on the web functions as a neuron. Information flows through the Internet, regulated and filtered by each of these neurons. I've started adding RSS feeds to a centralized aggregator. I have this insatiable urge to keep adding more feeds, to become more tied in, and monitor more neurons. With what goal? Well, to find the Nodal Points, as another blogger called them. The interesting things being passed around; the things that "matter" to the Internet as a collective.

One type of these nodal points are the ever-popular memes. I often consider memes to be information viruses, but now I'm starting to think of them more as signals that happen to pass particularly well from neuron to neuron.

One such example of this is the site, Friendster. I was very amused to learn of its existence one day, chat about it on IRC that evening, be IM'd by two friends from RIT (within an hour of each other) the next day, and then participating in it, passing it on, the day after that.

The last step is to create a technical system for automatically digesting the feeds and sorting out the most relevant bits of information. Think of it as a Google page-ranking system for "real-time" data feeds. The more automated the system becomes, the larger it can scale and the more dendrites can form between the neurons.

What results from this ever-interlinking collective network of minds? That's a question on par with "What is the meaning of life?". The more I ponder the significance of the Internet the more I hope that the answer to both questions is the same.

Every once in awhile, while in the shower or some other such monotonous task, I get ideas that I think just have to be written down. My first instinct is to draw up a HTML document on the idea, trying to organize and formalize it. One of the reasons for this is - well - I want to pass it on and see what others think.

I wrote up two such ideas recently: a way of transporting an inexpensive object (say, a borrowed book, a burned CD, or such) across a network of people. People are constantly moving; why not try and harness some of that movement for a collective good?

The other (which actually has market potential) is a slight tweak to a used book store. This used book redistribution network favours the movement of the book - the more the book moves on through the network, the more money the people involved in its transport get. If it were implemented well and if it caught on it'd be nifty. Of course, to be effective the users have to grok it (one of the main issues people have mentioned so far; it's very confusing). Maybe someday when I have money to burn and time to waste on projects like this, I'll put it together. Until then, I'll continue posting wacky ideas I have in hopes that anyone cares.

Cellphone update: Well, as I feared, the replacement phone didn't actually come in the mail. I called on Tuesday to confirm that they sent the order out, and I learned that they didn't even have a record of the order in their system. After 45 minutes on the phone with a nice customer service rep., I got a confirmed order and was told that it'd probably arrive by Monday. Most of the conversation was trying to figure out how I could possibly get a phone that I could borrow for the weekend, so I'd be able to twiddle plans while in Boston.

A fun quote from that conversation:

Me: "So, are there any T-Mobile stores that can get me a temporary phone until the new one arrives?"

..pause..

Rep: "Is New York large?"

Me: "Pardon?"

Rep: "Is New York rather large?"

Me: "Uh, Yeah. It's about 6 hours from here to New York City"

It turned out there were no places in the "loaner program" near me and that I'd have to go on an 8 hour bus ride and weekend in Boston with no cell/Internet connection (horror of horrors!). So, I asked him if it'd just be possible to buy a phone (with Bluetooth) and return it within their 14-day "no obligation" trial period and he said that would work.

I stopped by the local T-Mobile shop in the nearby mall and got a Sony Ericsson T68i (it was the cheapest they had with Bluetooth and I figured I'd try a new phone for kicks). So far, it's been working great on both my Palm and my laptop. I still can't get over how light the phone is - it feels like one of those empty "dummy demo models" they have at cheap electronics stores. I'm not so fond of it though - not enough features - and look forward to toting around a Nokia 3650 again.

I'm very fond of soda (not "pop", as Midwesterners, southerners, or Canadians might call it. It's "soda" or "carbonated beverage" in my book). I'm particularly fond of Coke®, ginger beer (the stuff that burns as it goes down), root beer, birch beer, and (the focus of this post) grape soda|grape or orange soda. The last two behave in a rather unusual fashion though: unlike the other flavours, their quality of taste is inversely proportionate to the apparent quality of the beverage.

The primary characteristics I look for in a soda are:

1. carbonation
2. sweetness
3. caffeine content
4. flavour

I've found the best beverages are a good balance of the first three, with each drink defined by the fourth trait. Too much of any one trait can ruin a beverage and overpower any of the other traits. It's refreshing, though, to occasionally focus on one characteristic when selecting a beverage: in the case of Mountain Dew (or the tastier Code Red), the focus is on the third trait. The same applies with Red Bull, although other chemicals are used to function in conjunction with the caffeine to enhance the "energy" nature of the beverage.

In the case of orange or grape soda, the best drinks come when the first is fairly medium, the second is maximized, and there's a good selection on the fourth. If a grape soda is not sweet enough, it ends up becoming much too tart. Too much carbonation overpowers the flavour, and too little makes it taste too much like slightly-fermented grape juice.

The problem arises in these two traits: companies that produce more "expensive" beverages try and deviate from the established "fairly sweet with medium carbonation" paradigm that tends to turn out the best. The data are summarized below (with caffeine left out as none had any):

Note: "corp" means "corporate", "store" means the given beverage is a store brand.

• Polar grape (corp): medium carbonation, mild sweetness: too tart, not very good
• Wegman's grape (store): medium carbonation, strong sweetness: a very "hard candy" flavour
• Shaw's grape (store): medium carbonation, strong sweetness: a bit more tart than Wegman's
• Bread & Circus grape(expensive store): mild carbonation, strong sweetness: light grape flavour, much too tart
• Shasta grape (cheap corp): mild/medium carbonation medium/strong sweetness: a good grape flavour, but a bit light on the other two traits

From the data, you can see that the best grape sodas tend to be the "store" or "cheap corp" sodas. One could hypothesize that the cheaper or more generic the grape soda brand, the better overall it becomes. Thus, the actual beverage quality is inversely-proportional to the "cost" or apparent quality of the beverage. This is a rather counter-intuitive phenomenon that is not often found in other beverage categories.

This was tested with orange soda as well, with the results being that cheap store brands were far better than Coke or Pepsi's answer to the orange soda demand. (especially the Minute Maid brand version).

The question arises: why? I postulate that it's a result of the more expensive brands trying to make the drink seem less "candy"-like and more like their more popular beverages. That, unfortunately, is against the nature of these two flavours. Overall, though, it's not that big a deal as the better sodas end up being cheaper and can therefore be bought in much greater bulk: ready for any long coding sessions.

Now, normally, when you do buffer->processor->buffer, you would use buffers that will handle everything flowing through them. Dish racks do not do this. A dish rack does not scale. Usually, they're under-powered for the given load of perhaps two meal's worth of dishes. Problem 2 is that they're not FIFO. You put a dish into the dish rack, it takes a specific amount of time to dry while in the dish rack, then you remove it. But, as you're washing, if the rack can't hold enough dishes, your're forced to either remove the dishes from the rackand dry them by hand or stack others on top of the dishes already in the rack. If you dry them by hand, the entire functionality of having a dish rack is lost. If you stack them, the same problem occurs as the wet ones drip onto the dry ones and make it so you can't take the dry ones out before the wet ones.

I truely hope there's someone out there, designing a dish rack that doesn't suck.