a letter to my constituents

Funny how in my last post I mentioned Live search. A month and a half or so has passed since then and Live is done, stick a fork in it. 

Now, if you go to www.live.com you get bounced to Bing. WTF is Bing? It's Microsoft's latest attempt at contesting Google's dominance of web search. I've used Bing a couple times. I can't say anything bad about it, but I also can't say that there's anything special about it that gives me reason to use it over Google. Millions of people are in the habit of googling. How will Microsoft convince them to stop googling and start binging (not to be confused with bingeing).  Maybe some of them wonder if you can google on Bing. Is Bing a better googler than Google? Will Bing become a verb? How will Bing conquer the internet?

As I type this, I'm watching the national soccer teams of Spain and the USA in the first period (or half or however soccer's split up) of their match in the FIFA Confederations Cup, somewhere in South Africa. Neither team has scored yet, at 11:45 into the match. I'm not a big soccer fan but I like watching it sometimes. I'd rather watch soccer than hockey, that's for sure. It's hard not to be drawn into the crowd's enthusiasm for the game. Soccer fans are maniacs, and I mean that as a compliment. I love the intensity. It reminds me a lot of college football.

The last 3 days I had jury duty. I was grumpy at first that I'd be taking a pay cut for a couple days (I don't get paid if I'm at jury duty) but I soon got over it and started to enjoy my civic duty. I figure it'll be one of the few times in my life where I'm directly involved in a government function. Or maybe it's blown my mind and I'll go on a quest to be the next John Adams.

I will say this, I feel a little more patriotic than I did before serving in that jury. It also gave me a little more faith in my fellow Americans. And I'd say I feel a little more compassionate towards human beings in general. I'm a better person for having served in that jury. I'm glad the founders of our country laid out such an excellent system. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I think it's pretty bad-ass. My fellow jurors and I were the center of the universe there for a few. Everything hinged on what we decided. I had moments with dim recollections of Kafka and Dostoevsky. Sometimes I thought I might go insane with boredom and break out of the courthouse screaming with several sheriff's deputies sprinting after me. But mostly it was an awesome experience that improved me as a man and as a person. I'm glad I didn't labor over ways out. I'm sure I could've imagined up something to get out of jury duty, but why? WTF is wrong with people that they want to get out of it? Those people should be sent to countries that don't have trial by jury.

Storms moved through the Pensacola area yesterday. They were a welcome relief from over a week's worth of heat indexes over a hundred a couple record-setting days...

USA SCORES!!!!!!!!!!! (around 26 minutes in)

...there's nothing like waiting tables outside in over a hundred degree temps and worrying that the sweat which has built up all over your face just in the brief time since you wiped it off before walking to the table will drip off your nose and disgust the guests. That sucks. Mostly I don't mind the heat (sometimes it annoys me) but I did welcome yesterday's rain. It'd been too long and we needed a break from the heat. I'm pretty sure most of the plants liked it, too...well, except for one of my fellow juror's tomatoes. He said he was going to be having a bunch of fried green tomatoes because the rainstorms damaged a bunch of his plants. Oops. Collateral damage.

Cheers,

mitchell

Lazy Man's XP Optimization

I recently did a Live search for the terms "optimizing xp in older machines". The first link Live gave me was Optimizing Windows XP on an older machine. The link led to a useful page. That's all I ask for from a search engine.

From there I chose Eric's first link, A faster Windows XP? Here's how. I followed the instructions to disable indexing services. Cool. I just learned a little about how Windows XP works, and I sped up my computer a little.

Afterword
The more I learn about how computers and operating systems work, the more I realize that they use a significant amount of resources doing things that most people don't care about or need. I'm also surprised by how much is required of a computer's processor(s) to just deal with the increasingly graphics/video-centric Web. I wonder how many computer crashes are caused each day simply by going to MySpace.

tracing Israel controls stupid Americans article

My normally pleasant morning cruise through the intertubes was disrupted by a disturbing feature on Truthed. I don't know much about the site. I'd never been there before. I'd only happened upon it because a Twitter friend posted a link from Truthed to a video of a woman who was beaten by a police officer. I clicked to the home page and was immediately irked by the first image of their feature marquee (or whatever it's called). It showed an Israeli flag and said, "Israeli Spokesman Says We Control Stupid Americans".

The image linked to a forum post by one of the forum moderators. The post was a quote of an article from a site called Pakistan Daily. As it appeared this morning, Thursday, February 5, at around 6:30 AM Central time, the article's byline says "WRITTEN BY WWW.DAILY.PK". It's dated Sunday, 01 February 2009. In the article, it says:

You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House. You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they (Americans) do to us? We control congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America you can criticize God, but you can't criticize Israel.

There's no context for the quote. Was it from a press conference? An interview? The source is someone named Tzipora Menache, allegedly an "Israeli spokeswoman". We'll see what we can find out about her later.

My first thought, after being disgusted, was wondering what the Twitterverse had to say about the article. I did a Twitter search and found that the article was older than claimed on Pakistan Daily. The Twitter search led me to a post on Uruknet.info, which is subtitled "information from occupied iraq". That article was very similar to the one on Pakistan Daily. In fact, the only difference is that some of the paragraphs were shuffled. The article on Uruknet.info clearly links to the original at thepeoplesvoice.org. The original article is titled "How to Kill a Palestinian" and is written by Dr. Elias Akleh.

My point here isn't about whether Israel's Gaza attacks are right and wrong. My main beef is with Truthed.com. Their post is followed by a post from the Truthed administrator which attempts to disclaims the anti-Israel, the Jews control stupid Americans article by stating:

Pakistan Daily, so take it with a grain of salt. Everyone has an agenda.

Apparently Truthed.com has an agenda, too. A forum moderator posted a dubious anti-Israel article and the SITE ADMIN said to ignore it...BUT THEY FEATURED IT ON THEIR FRONT PAGE.

WTF?

A site apparently dedicated to truth FEATURED an article which apparently has little to do with truth and everything to do with inciting people with vaporous claims meant to slant Americans and the world in general against Israel and the Jews.

Infinite Changeability

I use browser-based email applications because they look better than Apple Mail, Outlook, Eudora, and every other conventional email app that I've seen.

Customizing one's computer experience should be at least as easy and have as many options as one's MySpace page.

I'm not saying Gmail's appearance is as changeable as a MySpace profile page but with the introduction of themes, it's showing itself to be on the right path. Maybe when I check my email I like to see a little anime raccoon raking sand in its Zen garden. I can do that with Gmail, but Apple Mail has no such option, that I know of.

They think in images—prose is for them a code

My wanderings around the web which led me to this post, in reverse:

A contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else. All transmitted knowledge is memetic.

Meme

The only ones who actually wish to share the mischievous destiny of those savage runaways or minor guerillas rather than dictate it, the only ones who can understand that cherishing & unleashing are the same act—these are mostly artists, anarchists, perverts, heretics, a band apart (as much from each other as from the world) or able to meet only as wild children might, locking gazes across a dinnertable while adults gibber from behind their masks.

WildChildren

"Rebellion to tyrants
is obedience to God."
—Thomas Jefferson

Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension

Which I got to by way of Directory > Society and Culture > Cultures and Groups > Cyberculture.

Does anyone still use Yahoo's directory search? Does anyone remember when that's basically what Yahoo looked like? Remember when it was just a college project?

Exploring Yahoo's directory provides more opportunities for random finds compared to the more common keyword searches. The directories offer you avenues of exploration you may not have thought of otherwise.

Chrome Your Windows

Yesterday I downloaded Google's new web browser, Chrome.  I went so far as to bring my old Windows laptop out of its bag in the closet, slog through the Service Pack 3 install, and a slew of other updates in order to test drive Chrome.  I've gone back and forth from Chrome to Internet Explorer (7) to Safari.  Chrome seems to be faster than IE.  The Safari comparison isn't fair because it's on my iBook G4 which has 4x as much RAM as my Windows computer, a Toshiba Satellite which I've had for like 6-7 years.  Also, I'm not familiar with Windows shortcut keys so I can't switch through different windows as quickly as I can on my Mac.  I like to work with multiple browser windows as opposed to multiple tabs.  I like the expose feature (or whatever it's called) on OS X which lets me view all my open windows at once.  Yeah, with XP, I can just look down at the taskbar and see what's open but it gets crowded quickly and isn't as easy for me to find what I'm looking for.

Anyhoo, this is supposed to be about Chrome.  Like I said, it appears to be faster than IE and so far every page I've looked at has come up looking good and proper.  I LOVE how Chrome allows you to pull tabs out into separate windows and put them back into one window by simply dragging and dropping.  That's cool.  I also like how it allows you to easily convert something like Blogger to a sort of standalone widget.  In Google's words:

Many websites, such as email services, operate like actual programs, similar to those on your computer desktop. Google Chrome supports these web applications by providing a special window designed specifically for web applications.

Microsoft might be annoyed by the emergence of a Google web browser but there's an upside: Chrome encouraged me to step away from my Apple for a bit and get reacquainted with my Windows-based machine.

Engadget is a whiny baby

 Engadget recently distilled a NY Times article into a blog post, Microsoft and NBC working on copyright filters for Zune?  They go through the routine of how it's bullshit that companies are trying to protect their property, as if we have an inherent right to do whatever we want with whatever we want.  I'm mostly sympathetic to such views.  I believe in freedom, and that means I believe that people/companies have the freedom to protect their shit.  It's no more "wrong" for Microsoft to want their products to protect the rights of their clients than it is for me to want to be able to watch a movie, which I copied from you (illegally), on my media player.  Companies (and a lot of people) exist so they can make money.  Giving their products away for free or sitting idly by while people just take whatever they want doesn't make any sense.  There's not a lot of proof that illegal sharing (LOL...illegal sharing...thou shalt not share) is pilfering from the coffers of the corporations and it's impossible to totally lock down your stuff but that doesn't mean that companies are evil or foolish for wanting to try to lock down their property.  It's like not bothering to put locks on your doors because there are ninjas who can pick them.  Whatever.  I lock my doors.

And then Engadget goes on to bitch about Micro$oft and AT$T working on filtering copyrighted material at the ISP level.  I just don't get why people think that companies are evil for trying to prevent them from doing shit that's illegal.  Again, I'm not against file sharing.  I'm just against the belief that for-profit entities are wrong for attempting to maximize profit.  If you have a network that you built and paid for then you'd want to do what you want with it.  Is it so wrong for there to be forces patrolling the internet in the same way there are forces patrolling our highways trying to bust people for breaking the law?  Only the staunchest anarchist would argue that there is no good reason for the existence of police.  You don't have to be for such groups.  Do what you want to do and accept the fact that your behavior brings you enemies.  Repercussions make life fun, right?

The Internet Today

Today on the Internet I met a young man named Bryan Bishop.  I didn't meet him in the conventional sense.  I first met him on Slashdot when he posted this question, What is the first day in a University Lab Like?  Again, I didn't meet him as in, "Hi, I'm Mitchell.  Nice to meet you."  "Hi, I'm Bryan.  Nice to meet you."  I met him in an Internet sort of way.  His words gave me a bit of an introduction to him.  Intrigued, I clicked his name and wound up on his homepage.  What an interesting fellow.  It's amazing to see someone who's done so much and has so many interesting ideas.  I clicked around on some of his links and followed some threads here and there and generally spent a whole bunch of time reading somewhat random stuff of interest to a high school senior in Texas.  I found some really cool sites, my current favorite being KurzweilAI.net.  If nothing else, check out their trippy search function, The Brain.  Thanks to Bryan for being a cool guy who puts worthwhile things on the Internet.  I wouldn't know the guy if I tripped over him but I feel like I kinda know him a little bit now.

In other thrilling Internet goings-on spotlighted by Slashdot, there's an article at Yahoo! about the ongoing existence of the top level domain for the Soviet Union, Back in the USSR: Soviet internet domain name resists death.  Maybe the old American Confederacy could get its own TLD.  Or the Republic of Texas.  That'd be cool.

Accept Fear but Do Not Submit

This is good stuff. It's a clip from G4TV about the Great Firewall of China. Xeni Jardin is a real-life cyberpunk chick. I found this video by way of BoingBoing, which Xeni coedits. The story fascinates me because it encompasses both technology and revolt. I support any person's or people's drive to greater self-determination. I really cannot comprehend what makes Person A want to kill Person B for not wanting to be subjected to Person A. Fuck that shit. Why don't more people see how messed up that is? Why do we allow our governments to behave this way? Fear? What else could it be?

I'm reminded of V for Vendetta.

God bless alliteration!

I am not wholly sympathetic with the Tibetan cause. I can't help seeing shadowy figures from the US government skulking in the background. I'm not a fan of theocracies, even a Buddhist one. And I can't trust what I see:

Question everything. Do not blindly accept what They tell you.

Verizon courts privacy advocates

I'm a customer of AT&T and while I can't really complain about my personal experience with them, I can't really say much that's positive, either. AT&T has participated in some customer surveillance shenanigans, though, and they seem to be willing to be compliant with government efforts to snoop on people.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed legal briefs and evidence against AT&T, claiming they are diverting Internet traffic to the NSA for widespread secret surveillance and possibly breaking federal wiretapping laws and the Fourth Amendment. [SecurityFocus]

It's not just AT&T, though. It seems that most companies involved with data flow are looking at ways to snoop on their customer's activities. Well, Thomas J. Tauke, executive vice president for public affairs at Verizon, is breathing some refreshing ideas into the discussion:

“We generally are reluctant to get into the business of examining content that flows across our networks and taking some action as a result of that content,” he said.

Amen, brother!

Preach on!

“We don’t want to solve any network congestion issues by restricting the flow of certain kinds of traffic,” he said.

Read the complete article from the New York Times: Verizon Rejects Hollywood’s Call to Aid Piracy Fight. [by way of Gizmodo]

the computer knows who I am

This is what trips me out about the whole internet experience, experiences like the one I just had.  I was going through my semi regular regimen of reading various rss feeds when I came across this article on Wired: Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened?

What's interesting is the not only the content of the article, which is excellently written, but also the form of the article.  Look at the way it uses links and what I'll call insets, those windows within the browser window, which are in fact mini browser windows.  Weird.  I know I'm in the Googleverse when I just happen to be on an article on Wired and when I look at the insets it has for quoted Google based sites I see a "Hi, ________".  That inset knows who I am!

I read an article about artificial intelligence.  My computer and the internet know who I am.