What they're not telling you

Google announced an operating system yesterday. No big deal because even the fantastic Chrome browser has a tiny tiny market share that nobody cares about. What Google, Microsoft, Apple and Oracle aren't telling you is that they are all developing systems where your computer and storage will be virtualized and all you need is a dumb-ish front end. Mark my words, MS will probably be the first to have something significant to market where most of your apps run on a VM in the cloud. You'll probably be able to use your Windows machine from a Mac through something like Silverlight or RDP. Pay as you go for your apps and storage, coming soon...

Maslow and the peak experience

A long time ago, like around 1990 - I read an essay in a book of cyberpunk short stories called Semiotext(e) SF from the subversive publisher of the same name. It stuck with me this whole time and really shaped the way I view things. I lost the book many moves ago and it's out of print so it wasn't easy to find but I recently re-ordered on Amazon from a used book vendor.

The subject matter is peak experiences which in my mind are essential for balanced living and something I've written about a few times. Here's the story OCR'ed for your benefit in all it's original splendor - enjoy!

---

Colin Wilson, a literatus or homme des lettres who has accomplished great things in nearly every print genre from philosophy to encyclopedias, has exercised tremendous influence on anti-authoritarian circles, thanks to his work in libratory psychology. But he is also idolized in SF circles for his Lovecraftian pastiches. Legend has it that Wilson once criticized HPL's atrocious style and was challenged by August Derleth to do better. SPACE VAMPIRES and LIFE FORCE were the result, by far the most orignial contributions to the Mythos since the master's death. HPL's genius owed much to sexual repression. Wilson's inspira- tion was to uncover the sexually "buried"in pulp and horror and free it from its bonds, transforming its energy from neurosis to self-realization. He has recently published a major SF far-future trilogy, SPIDER WORLD, with a similar philo- sophical agenda.

Bob Banner, who edits CRITIQUE: A JOURNAL OF METAPHYSICS AND CON‑SPIRACY (the best periodical on conspiracy theory), asked Colin Wilson for a brief resume of his central philosophical idea. We found the result valuable enough to warrant its inclusion as one of our three non-fiction pieces. Some doubt has recently been cast on Sheldrake's interpretation of the "100th monkey" mate­rial—but this doubt cannot rule out the possibility of some other "vitalist" de­velopment in biology with the same implications. Morphogenetic field research looks particularly promising in this respect. Aside from this one point, we find Wilson's essay a powerful manifesto of self-evident importance.

Maslow, Sheldrake, and the Peak Experience

By Colin Wilson

The other day in our local pub, a stranger asked me how many books I had written. When I said 55, he looked startled, and asked me whether there was any constant theme that ran through them. Lying awake in the middle of the night, I decided to treat this as a challenge, and try to summarize the basic theme of all my work. The result—which follows—comes as close to it as I can manage in a couple of thousand words.

About twenty-five years ago, I received a letter from an Ameri­can professor of psychology called Abraham Maslow. What he had to say struck me as breathtakingly original. Maslow said that, as a psy­chologist, he had got tired of studying sick people, because they never talked about anything but their sickness. It struck him that nobody had ever bothered to study healthy people. So he asked around among his friends: "Who is the healthiest person you know?" And he then got all the healthy people together and asked them questions. He immediately discovered something that no one else had ever found out: that all ex­tremely healthy people have, with a fair degree of frequency, what Mas­low called "peak experiences," experiences of bubbling, overwhelming happiness.

A typical one was as follows. A young mother was watching her husband and children eating breakfast. Suddenly, a beam of sunlight came in through the window. She thought: "My God, aren't I lucky?", and went into the peak experience.

When Maslow talked about peak experiences to his students, he made another important discovery. They began recalling peak experi­ences which they'd had in the past, which they'd now half-forgotten. He realized that this is the problem: that we all have peak experiences, but we take them for granted and quickly forget them. But as soon as his students began recalling their peak experiences, and talking about them to one another, they all began having more peak experiences. Talking and thinking about them somehow put them in the right frame of mind for further peak experiences.

All this excited me tremendously. For obviously if science could discover how to induce peak experiences, most of our worst social prob­lems would vanish. Even then, in the early 1960s, it was obvious that most of our problems are due to boredom and frustration, and that alco­holism, drug abuse, football hooliganism, vandalism and sex crime are really a muddled search for the peak experience. If we could learn the secret of the peak experience, we would be well on our way towards H. G. Wells's "modern Utopia."

But when I put this question to Maslow, his answer disappointed me. He said he didn't think it was possible to have peak experiences "at will." They came when they wanted to, and there was nothing much we could do about it. Yet it seemed to me that this comment ran counter to his basic optimism. And I settled down to try and answer the question of how to induce peak experiences.

The first clue was that Maslow's students had started having more peak experiences as soon as they began thinking and talking about them. The reason is obvious. Thinking and talking about happiness puts you into an optimistic frame of mind. You get the feeling that man was intended to be happy. The philosopher Epictetus made the interesting observation: "Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems." That is to say, we tend to get stuck in a thoroughly negative frame of mind. That is why healthy people have more peak experiences; they don't waste so much time worrying about things that will never happen.

In the past twenty-five years, I have learned a great deal about the various tricks for inducing the peak experience, and have proved to my own satisfaction that Maslow was mistaken. (Un‑ fortunately, he died before I had time to tell him so.) There are a great many simple mental techniques for inducing the peak experience, and the basic method is always the same: to deliberately generate "inner tension," followed immediately by relaxation. Graham Greene discov­ered the basic method when, as a teenager, he played Russian roulette with his brother's revolver. When the hammer clicked on an empty cham­ber, he experienced an overwhelming sense of delight. This method is obviously not to be recommended, but anyone who thinks about it care­fully will see that it contains all the important clues.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent four days in Amsterdam, trying to teach a roomful of "mature students" how to induce peak experiences. The experiment was successful beyond my expectations. During the final session, two students became convinced that they could see a golden light, while another said she had apparently floated clear off the floor.

But does all this bring us any nearer to "a modern Utopia?" Five years ago, I would have said no. But in the meantime, there has been a new and fascinating development. This is largely due to the work of one single man, the biologist Rupert Sheldrake. It was She!drake who, in a book called A New Science of Life, came up with a theory of evolution that outraged most of his older colleagues. According to modern biology, evolution occurs through changes in the genes. According to Sheldrake, there is a simpler and much quicker method, which he calls "morphic resonance." The simplest way of explaining this is to cite the famous story about the monkeys on the island of Koshima, off the coast of Japan. Scientists fed the monkeys unwashed sweet potatoes, and one exceptionally bright female named Imo discovered that if she washed her potatoes in the sea, they were not only less gritty, but tasted better. Soon all the monkeys on Koshima had learned the trick. But so had other monkeys on the mainland—monkeys who had had no kind of contact with those on Koshima.

Was it some form of telepathy? Apparently not, for it not only works for animals, but for crystals. Some substances are extremely diffi­cult to crystallize in the laboratory. But as soon as one laboratory has succeeded in doing it, the substance begins to crystallize much easier all over the world. At first it was thought that visiting scientists had carried tiny fragments of the new crystals on their clothes or beards. But this possibility was finally eliminated. Apparently the crystals were some­how "learning" from one another... Sheldrake set out to prove his theory with a number of experiments. One of these involved sending out thou­sands of those trick "pictures" in which a face is concealed in a mass of lines. He reasoned that once a certain number of people had learned to "see" the face, increasing numbers of people would be able to see it immediately. And that is precisely what happened.

If Sheldrake is right—and the biologists are fighting him tooth and nail every inch of the way—the consequences would obviously be momentous. To begin with, we would have to recognize that our writers and artists are largely to blame for the chaotic state of society. The chief qualification for a Nobel Prize is apparently to believe that life is futile and meaningless, and to say this in books and plays that end in the defeat of the hero. We stuff this poisonous rubbish down the throats of our children at school and university, and apparently believe that we are equipping them to face life. If there is anything to the theory of morphic resonance, then this is the equivalent of pouring plague germs into a city's water supply.

On the other hand, if a fairly large group of human beings could learn to have peak experiences at will—or simply learn to put themselves into the state of mind in which peak experiences are likely—then, ac­cording to Sheldrake, it should continue to spread naturally to increasing numbers of people. And perhaps a century hence—perhaps far less— everybody would be born with the ability to induce peak experiences. And the face of our civilization would be totally changed.

This made my day

Started off in a bad mood until I saw this;

Wow, I made it five years

Fuck, I didn't even notice that I've been posting here for five years. That's a really long time, never figured that I'd last that long.

Here's what my first post looked like ;

(so much for relevance and depth huh?)

Friday, June 04, 2004

Hello

Am I only coming through in waves?

Facebook S/N ratio

Seems like a lot of blogs have gone really quiet while activity has moved to twitter and facebook. I've actually now decided to go in the exact opposite direction. The reason for this is twofold.

First off;

I dislike FB because it pushes other people's updates to me without having subscribed explicitly. This was fine for a few months but rapidly became a mundane pattern of vanity updates and game invitations. FB also only lets you view updates from people who you know who are your friend which limits the availability of relevant information/updates to those in your network. That in itself turns out to be a torrent of utter crap with the odd shard of anything useful floating by. FB for me is now a useful spam free social email replacement tool if you only use the messaging and block noisy friends.

Second;

I dislike Twitter because for the most part there isn't very much thought put into tweets as they are more or less designed to be sent by phone. Twitter streams are interesting but not captivating (speaking for myself of course).

Finally;

I got off of blogging because I found that too many blogs were fucking crapego masturbating vanity monuments to the church of how cool am I. I was and still am afraid that this one is the same although a while ago I stopped posting about what I was doing and more what I was thinking. Now I have returned and will try to make my posts more relevant and hope to emit more revelations with some depth and links to stuff that I find particularly cool.

Speaking of cool, I love these two new-ish tracks;

Growth

Seeing that it's been a long time since I posted anything meaningful, I thought I'd start again. Don't get me wrong, lots of people are pretty happy with the Excel post from January but it wasn't very deep. Depth is something severely lacking from Facebook and to some degree Twitter so I find myself back here at blogspot re-pondering my social interaction with the intertubes.

So here goes... I think that I posted this already but it's worth reposting. Here's Bruce Mau's manifesto;

An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.

12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

17. ——————————. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.

18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world.

19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.

21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.

22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.

24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.

25. Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.

26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our “noodle.”

28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.

29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between “creatives” and “suits” is what Leonard Cohen calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'

31. Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.

32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.

34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea — I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else … but not words.

37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces — what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference — the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.

41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.

Love this

check it out

A triple violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights in Keswick Ontario

Somewhere in the backwoods town of Keswick Ontario, a police department and school are making a mockery of our charter of rights. It seems an Asian youth was being bullied by a 'white' youth. The 'white' kid threw a punch and the Asian kid being a black belt, quickly gave his foe a broken nose.

Both were suspended even though one was clearly defending himself. Here's where it gets sick, the Asian kid is being charged with assault by the police and will be expelled from the school. The other kid gets off scott free even though he's the bully and started the fight.


Our Charter of Rights grants us security, freedom from punishment and freedom from discrimination based on race.

I paraphrase our Charter word for word here;

Legal Rights

LIFE, LIBERTY AND SECURITY OF PERSON.

7. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice

TREATMENT OR PUNISHMENT.

12. Everyone has the right not to be subjected to any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.

Equality Rights

EQUALITY BEFORE AND UNDER LAW AND EQUAL PROTECTION AND BENEFIT OF LAW / Affirmative action programs.
15. (1) Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.

I'm pissed off, really really pissed. I urge you to write a polite email to these authorities who clearly don't get it and don't understand our Constitution and Charter of Rights.

CATHERINE McGINLEY
Principal
Keswick high school
keswick.hs@yrdsb.edu.on.ca

York Regional Police Department
Armand P. La Barge
Chief of Police
info@yrp.ca

Here's the Globe and Mail story

Follow up;

Hate crimes investigation

The kids uprising also made Keith Olbermans #1 best person in the world last night.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

This is cool

Now if they could just combine this with the Tegra platform. Hmmm.....

I can't tell you how much I want one of these

Just fucking sick!

Here come the Tegras

I've been anxiously waiting for Tegra based mobile devices for a while. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft will be the first out of the gate with the new Zune and Winmo 7. Although Apple has a pretty good relationship with nVidia, I think it's unlikely that they can revamp their whole core platform just to support this core.

It's about time we see some cool shit like this;

Muppet gore

The smartest thing

This is clearly the smartest thing I've seen this year. It's 18 minutes long so if you have ADD or couldn't give a crap about macroeconomics and evolution then don't bother.

Here's a couple of videos I like

Trentemøller: Moan


Trentemøller: Miss You


royksopp: what else is there


crystal castles: crimewave

I want one...

Something better

I feel guilty for posting such a boring post on Excel, here's the Crystal Castles from Toronto to cheer you up. Alice Glass has some wicked eyes. (edit: Video moved to post above)

Excel 2007 'Cannot empty the Clipboard'

This might save somebody some time and headaches if google picks it up. I was getting a 'Cannot empty the Clipboard' error every time I moved cells around in Excel - eventually I mucked around with the settings and made it go away. Here's how; In the excel main menu (glass globe w/logo), click Excel options, then Advanced, then turn off 'Show paste options buttons'

How exciting was this as my first post of the year?

Update: I still haven't found a permanent solution but I found another thing that seems to help. In Excel 2007, from the "home" tab, the first thing on the left is the clipboard tool panel. Expand the panel to view the clipboard and in the clipboard you might find "cannot empty clipboard" as an entry. Empty the clipboard, keep the panel open for a second or two while you do a few cut and pastes/drags etc. and then the bogey seems to go away.

I call this the cable dance because back in the day I had a printer that only worked if you unplugged the cable, shook it out and plugged it back in.

Great track by Common

check this out.

Something cool on Surface

Microsoft seems to have a lot of inertia with Surface apps and I think that we've seen a lot of great things out of their newer user interfaces. They kidnapped abducted recruited some great people from Adobe, Apple and Frogdesign and it's really starting to show. The new Zune software is brilliant and so is the Virtual Earth interface.

What they need is some equal talent on the hardware side. To date most Wintel laptops, media players and mobile devices have form factors that basicly suck ass. HTC seems to be changing that on the mobile side but there aren't too many more companies pushing those boundaries. PC hardware is mostly the equivalent of GM cars from the 90's - fugly, cheap and flakey. Luckily there seems to be a wave of much cooler stuff coming out. Here's my wish list;

- PCs that look like they were made by Bang and Olufson
- Media players that look like they were made by Prada
- Laptops that look like they were made by BMW

Having said that, the questions that those suppliers would ask is would I be willing to to pay a premium for that? I'd say yes, by probably about 10% and not 35% like Apple demands.

Cool

Check this out.

Tethering a Blackberry Bold with Rogers

So I have this 6GB package with Rogers that I barely use but is still less expensive than the 500Mb package for reasons only known to Steve Jobs and the marketing fools @ Rogers.

I always thought that there was an extra charge for using the wireless data package with my laptop but as it turns out there isn't. So.... I gave it a try and it works well. 350Kbps up and down and essentially free because it's paid for. One more thing, I upgraded my firmware to .168 and it's rock solid and the battery life is great - highly recommended. Now it never crashes and works flawlessly.

Here's how to tether taken from Howard Forums;

Task 0: Connect your BB to your laptop using a USB cable or bluetooth* (* haven't tried yet)

Task 1: Install Blackberry desktop software on your computer.

Task 2:

Set up Internet APN.
1. Go to Start>Settings>Control Panel.
2. Double-click Phone and Modem Options.
3. In the Phone and Modem Options window, click the Modems tab.
4. Select Standard Modem and click Properties.
5. In the Standard Modem Properties window, click the Advanced tab.
6. In the Extra initialization commands field, type the following:
+cgdcont=1,"IP","Internet.com"

1. Click OK.
2. In the Phone and Modem Options window, click OK.

Task 3:

1. Go to Start>Settings>Network Connections.
2. Double-click New Connection Wizard. The New Connection Wizard opens.
3. Click Next.
4. Select the Connect to the Internet option. Click Next.
5. Select Setup my connection manually. Click Next.
6. Select Connect using a dial-up modem. Click Next.
7. If the Select a Device screen appears, select the Modem - Standard Modem check box. Click Next.
8. In the ISP Name field, type a name for your connection. Click Next.
9. In the Phone number field, type*99#. Click Next.
10. Indicate which users will have access to the connection. Click Next.
11. Enter the user name and password provided by your service provider. Click Next.
12. Click Finish.
13. In the Connect window, click Properties.
14. In the Properties window, verify that Modem - Standard Modem appears beneath the Connect using heading, and then click Configure.
15. In the Modem Configuration window, clear the Enable hardware flow control check box and make sure none of the other check boxes are selected. Click OK. In the Properties window, click OK.

Task 4:
Connect the BlackBerry device to the computer and verify that BlackBerry Desktop Manager displays Connected. The BlackBerry device must be identified by BlackBerry Desktop Manager in order for the modem to establish a connection

Task 5:
Connect to the Internet using dial-up networking.
Note: During this procedure, do not operate the BlackBerry Browser or any third-party applications on the BlackBerry device. An active data session may interfere with the modem connection. Also, make sure an ethernet connection is not active at the same time.

1. Connect the BlackBerry device to the computer.
2. Open BlackBerry Desktop Manager.
3. Click Start>Settings>Network Connections>.
4. Enter the user name and password provided by your service provider. (BLANK for Rogers)
5. Click Dial.

Congratulations to the USA

Congratulations for doing something incredibly brave. For the first time in decades I admire the USA.

More Thoughts on Obama

Southern Fried Liberals

I was in the Bahamas last week and there was a bunch of fat pink mustached southern sounding Americans swilling beer around the pool. Looked like a bunch of rednecks to me and I didn't think much of it until I saw that two of them had Obama t-shirts on. I must say that I was a bit shocked.

On the Web

Since I got back, I've been reading the news websites and reader comments go on about how great Obama is, either that or a bunch of obscure foil hat inuendos like how he's not an American, french kisses Castro and square dances with terrorists. There aren't many people praising John M, just shooting down Obama and about the same number calling Palin a dumbass whacko.

Running the Stand

Both candidates would make reasonable leaders but I'm terrified of Sarah Palin and for that reason above all others I think that McCain lacks judgement and isn't fit to run a hot dog stand. From a Canadian perspective, it's probably better that McCain wins but I can't think of a single Canadian that I know that isn't hoping for an Obama landslide.

Good luck my American friends and please don't fuck it up again.

My Prediction

Given the huge voting lines and massive early vote turnout I'm venturing to say that Obama will win by a big margin. People don't go to that much trouble unless they're really passionate and I think people are really passionate about change this time around. The lineups from what I can see seem to be civil and actually pleasant so I'm guessing they aren't filled with people scared to let a black man win.

Lets revisit this tomorrow, my gut feeling is that people are very anxious and excited about a new beginning.

How Prolific Was 2Pac?

When he said way back in 1995:

"I see no changes all I see is racist faces

misplaced hate makes disgrace to races
We under I wonder what it takes to make this
one better place, let's erase the wasted
Take the evil out the people they'll be acting right
'cause both black and white is smokin' crack tonight
and only time we chill is when we kill each other
it takes skill to be real, time to heal each other
And although it seems heaven sent
We ain't ready, to see a black President, uhh"

We're on the eve of change, are we really ready?

Dear Steve

Dear Steve, You don't look so hot, we're worried about you. What gives?
Your Amigo, Sanj

P.S. I think I'm finally going to buy one of your laptops

---

How sad would it be to lose a great innovator like SJ. As much as I can't stand Apple's smug marketing and arrogant posturing, the products are pretty ground breaking and the world will be a much worse place without Steve's hand. Anyways all that to say that Steve isn't looking so hot these days and today he looked like a corpse.

Tilt shift

How cool is this tilt shift lens effect?

Shrink this train from Stefan Gilgen on Vimeo.


Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.


Bathtub III from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Using Spore to Guide the Economy

Many people know about the Sims game and recently Spore where you build a world and it evolves based on how you tweak the 'DNA' and genetic pool of your simulation. Why can't you apply methodology the same to economic simulations? Here's my idea, the government and private sector combined should set up a massive simulation of people, economies and stimulus programs that run in much faster than real time and allow the general public to try out simulations of different economic programs. Google/Microsoft/Oracle/Amazon/Apple/IBM/OSF should chip in resources to build/connect to this cloud simulation and it should be open to supercomputers as well to plug in simulation results. Additionally, people can volunteer their free CPU cycles to try random parameters like the folding protein and SETI screensavers do.

It should be run like a contest and every couple of weeks, the top 1% of simulation results should be analyzed by a pool of really smart people. As the economy is a moving target, this should be an ongoing effort with base assumptions adjusted based on the changing reality.

There's almost no chance that this can be done in time to change what's going on now but there's no reason why a few spreadsheets can't be thrown out there with tweakable parameters to let pundits work on. I am pretty convinced that the crowd can figure out economic algorithms to ease or solve many of the economic pressures at hand.

Just a thought, much better than handing out free money and buying deadbeat mortgages with my tax dollars IMHO.

I figured it out

I finally figured out who Sarah Palin`s debate coach was.




Must have taken years to learn how to use so many words without saying anything. Obviously Palin`s got this act wired but she could use some medication for all that eye twitching.

McCain/Palin are kidding right?

First off let me tell you that as much as I dislike GWB, it's not because he's a republican -it's because he's an idiot. Second, I don't think that Obama has much of a platform other than not being GWB. Having said that, McPalin scares the shit out of me.

McPalin reminds me of those wind up chattering teeth that just keep knocking out robotic nonsense like a drunken Monty Python skit. I can't understand how this guy who's voted vastly in favor of GWB policies can consider himself the voice of change. How the fuck is this old fossil a maverick? Why doesn't he call himself a speed skater or a bowler because that's just about as relevant and maybe a little less humorous. He's kidding right? And meanwhile Rome is burning and Sarah is busy giving shout outs to third graders and throwing aw-shucks winks like she's selling corn and kisses at a state fair hot dog stand. WHAT THE FUCK, DO THEY REALLY THINK AMERICANS ARE THAT STUPID??? On second thought that's a good question, after all they did vote GWB in twice right? You guys are gonna vote in an executive to fix your global problems right? Did that somebody on the world stage just recently get their first passport? Didn't you learn the first time what happens when you put provincial imbeciles in charge of global affairs?

I'm afraid that Obama can't handle the crisis either but I'm infinitely more petrified of having a weaker/older GWB-esque relic in charge with a backwoods soccer mom running wing. In either case, we're fucked for a while and Chindia have a great chance to trample all over us with middle eastern sovereign funds bankrolling them.

Mark to Market, the big shaft

Lets say you had a bar of gold that's worth a thousand dollars today but all of a sudden nobody was trading gold for a few months. Is your gold worth zero? Not really, it's worth something close to a thousand dollars when people are buying again.

Here's the rub with banks and mortgage companies. Nobody these days wants to buy any mortgage, good or bad so they are forced to value the whole lot of them at zero even if only a few percentage are defaulting. The problem is that by valuing the mortgages that they are already holding at zero even though they will mostly be paid, the banks have 10 times less money to loan because of the way they're structured with leverage.

So 500 billion dollars of mostly good mortgages are marked down to zero even though most of them are worth most of their full value and thus 5 trillion dollars of bank liquidity is gone instantly. Thus explains why overnight so many banks collapsed.

How stupid is it that such a simple rule fucked up the entire dynamics of the economy and how stupid of the people who could do something about it a year ago didn't start until this week.

It's called Mark to Market regulations and you'll be hearing about it for a long time.

Greed and the American Public

I've seen a lot of comments from viewers on CNBC, CNN & FOX about how they reject the notion of a wholesale bank bailout. When you look at the reasoning behind why the bailout was defeated on Monday, it seems to stem from the perception that it's simply bailing out the greed and excess on Wall street. What most people seem to forget is that consumers share a great deal of the blame as well and they (we) should recognize that. What do I mean by that? Well, how many people in North America bought huge houses when interest rates were microscopic? How many people took 3 vacations a year on their credit cards? How many people leased multiple massive cars because they seemed so cheap? How many people ran up their credit cards? It goes on, the government lowered interest rates and both political parties encouraged people to buy houses with nothing down. Deregulation allowed banks to offer interest only 40 year mortgages to people who could barely afford it even in good times. The greedy system provided greedy people with unlimited nearly free toys and when the party ended the greedy people blamed the greedy system for victimizing them.

We're all going to eat shit for a while because credit has dried up even for responsible people and companies and without credit the whole economy goes into slow motion and sometimes seizes. I've heard many people talk about the 'old fashion' way of doing business without credit. That's a load of shit because without responsible credit this society wouldn't exist and without irresponsible credit, it wouldn't have grown as fast as it did. If your supplier doesn't give you 30 days credit and you don't give your clients 30 day credit, your business is going to suffer. If the concept of car lease/purchase financing is gone, we're all driving 8 year old rust buckets and a few million people will be out of work and UPS ceases to exist. Oh yeah, without credit your municipality can never fix anything major that breaks until you all go drop off a bags of cash at city hall.

I'm all for responsible credit and tighter regulations and I think that Warren Buffet and Mark Cuban are both right in their thinking that if you let investors buy in alongside the government into the credit pool that's currently seized up, almost everybody will come out better for it.

Until it un-seizes, we're all in big shit. Conserve your cash because you'll need it to survive or you'll find some great buying opportunities soon if things go well.

We are in deep shit

Deep deep shit my friends.

A really smart guy

This guy Vinod Khosla is one smart fella, read what he has to say about renewable energy. This dude is the type of guy that should be advising the governments on sustainable energy policies. Did I mention that he was the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and general partner at Kliener Perkins?

AOL Revisited

Once upon a time AOL had this huge following of non-technical people who used their cartoony software to send messages to each other and read the news. It was a walled garden for old people and kids who didn't understand the Internet. It was really cute, had pretty colors and nice icons and animations. Eventually AOL let their users onto a little bit of the Internet with some weird ass browser that didn't work with any site other than AOL. Eventually people got wise and realized that they really didn't want to pay triple what other people were paying for a playschool version of the Internet and AOL took a hit and had to dismantle their walled garden and let people free using Netscape and Internet Explorer. Today AOL is some third rate destination site and nobody really cares about them.

Apple is the new AOL, they give you pretty colors and shield you from the machine but at the same time don't let you do too much because they're afraid that you'll hurt yourself. They won't let developers write killer apps, they don't have the most killer hardware and they actually don't even have the most usable software.

RIM, Google and HTC show a glimmer of hope on how that can one day change. RIM's got a killer with the Bold with more to come around the corner, the HTC Touch HD is sick and finally tomorrow Google's launching the HTC with Android.

Oh yeah, did I mention that PCs/Laptops are becoming rapidly irrelevant? And Microsoft, well they're still around there in the background providing infrastructure and platforms but they are to some degree just enablers of the stuff to come while HTC/Google are the real drivers.

Hey Americans!

Your government just gave away $170 billion of your money to 'stimulate the economy', bought $200 billion in crappy mortgage companies, bought bad debts of $85 billion from a near dead bank and now is going to buy another $700 billion of bad debts from the banks.

That's after arguably spending a few hundred billion on a random war in the wrong place.

Your debt will be 11.3 trillion dollars after all is said and done.

My favorite video

Anybody that knows me knows that The Knife are one of my favorite acts, so it's no surprise that this Royksopp track with Karin from The Knife on vocals is my fave vid. I usually don't like Royksopp because they're too wimpy but this is pretty cool. BTW: Karin is the one eating the apple and not the one floating.

Royksopp - What Else Is There?

Biofuel is mostly dumb

In the long run, biofuel is really a pretty dumb idea. We already have a massive problem with fertilizer runoff, drinking water and deforestation so it just seems really stupid to trade air pollution for water/ground pollution. Brazil seems to have a good handle on sugar beets but they started in the 70s. Today we know a lot more about what happens when you trade forests for fields and it's clear that that's no good. The same goes for bio-plastics, we trade one kind of pollution for another and because it has some kind of first level benefit, most people ignore the net benefit/loss.

It's just plain dumb and that's what happens when you treat this kind of stuff emotionally and not pragmatically. We need to look at all of these things like an accountant would with objective eye towards cost/benefit. Push down pollution on one side and where does it pop out on the other?

There are a lot of dollars going into much better solutions but they just aren't as glamorous. My prediction is that capitalism will work it's magic and smart solutions will come but in the meantime some idiots will keep pushing stupid ideas to stupid people with emotional judgments. Think hard about this stuff next time somebody feeds you some more enviro-bullshit and embrace the stuff that really makes sense. Personally, I trust the capitalists to have a far more tangible impact than the rabid environmentalists;

http://www.dawn.com/2002/01/25/int18.htm
http://walmartstores.com/Sustainability/
http://www.pickensplan.com/index.php

On bolds and zunes

I've had my blackberry bold for a month now and I have to say that I'm loving it for the most part. The email + web is great, videos are decent and the screen & keyboard are awesome. The only thing about it that sucks is how much the thing crashes. Sometimes its a couple of times a day and sometimes it's every few days. Clearly this thing isn't quite perfect. On top of that, I'll have to be really careful with this one because my old phones took tons of abuse and lasted me years, the bold looks kind of fragile and reboots when it takes a big bump. I dread the day when I drop it on concrete.

Regarding the Zune, I have to say that the Zune Software V3 blows iTunes right out of the water and the Zune itself is still my preference over the iPods. I really don't like the touch and before you get your panties in a bunch, I do actually have one and use them both side by side. I don't use an iPhone but I get the general idea and understand why some people like them. I also noticed that the new iPod touch finally has a physical volume button but I still wouldn't get one if I had a choice. I am however using my 1st gen touch to play spore when I'm bored. Which brings me to another gripe - I bought spore on the iTunes store for 6 bucks and only after I downloaded it did I realize that it didn't work on my touch - fucking store and itunes didn't even warn me. I didn't read the fine print. I had to then buy the 10 buck touch version with no chance of a refund for my mistake.

At the end of the day, I still think that iFans are a closed minded group that don't really realize to what degree they've been been short-changed and won't figure it out until Apple becomes un-trendy. After all, Apple aren't really the underdog anymore and it's hard to be an individualist when everybody in your subway car has the exact same gear as you right? Are you really a counter culture individualist who uses the same gadgets as George Bush? Does listening to JJohnson & Feist somehow make up for it?

Apple used to run an advert about 1984 and big brother, these days I think that they're the second biggest brother on the planet with the first being Google.

Gina

How cool is this?

Two weeks with a blackberry bold

Week 1 went great, roaming around the east coast of Canada. No problems whatsoever switching between 3G/Edge/GSM. However when I got into NY state last friday, it started crashing regularly. Spent 4 days in NY/NJ upstate, midstate and bottom including coastal NJ and it crashed every 6 hrs. Zipped over to Boston for the past couple of days and now its rock solid. Seems like there are still some roaming issues with ATT USA and that's probably what's causing the launch delay.

My advice to RIM is to hold on until its rock solid because clearly it's going to be a disaster if released in the US in this state. In Canada however, rock solid and a joy to use. I get lots of Americans down here eyeing my device and asking me about it so clearly it's lustworth.

Oddly enough, at a software conference it seems like most of the programmer types use iPhones and the founder/owner types use crackberries.

It's been a while

I'm sitting here at the Seaport in Boston for the Business of Software conference and I have come to realize how great it is to get so much insight from people who have been through a lot more than I have. I've met loads of people who came from all over the world and spent some fairly significant money to be here. Since Boston isn't too far from me it wasn't such a big commitment but after being here this year I think I'll follow this conference wherever it goes next year even if that means going to the UK or wherever it is next.

I also realized that I have a lot of knowledge to share with others as I have been through 3 bootstrap companies, 2 IPOs, 2 mergers and 3 fiascos. That's a lot of startups! A fellow with a show on the BBC will be interviewing me about my experiences with VCs, that should be interesting.

So all that to say that I'll be contributing to this blog regularly again soon but probably more with a slant of what I've learnt over the years and what's driving me.

Adios from Boston!

Smug bastards

Every time I see a smug Apple advert it makes me want to puke. How about this, recently the biggest and most dangerous hacking hole since 1997 had been discovered, patched and closed by all of the major vendors together in a cooperative effort with no BS. This includes Microsoft, Cisco, CERT and all of the Linux/GPL community.

Everybody pitched in, coordinated and fixed their systems but the smuggest bastard of the lot (Apple) were not only late with a patch, failed to tell their customers about it but they also fucked up their patch and now Macs and OSX servers everywhere are vulnerable. Notice how the press hasn't jumped on their heads like they would for any other company? Good thing there's so few of them out there that nobody really gives a shit.

Test your connection here.

The Rotten Apple

It's no secret that I don't care too much for Apple and their products so take this post with a pinch of salt. Here's how the summer went with Apple;

1) Released a pretty phone with crappy reception
2) Came out first in the IBM most vulnerable software list
3) Filled my computer with junk and keeps asking me to download 70mb of new junk every month
4) Released a crappy mobile web email app that doesn't work too well
5) Launched a mobile app store that keeps going out of service

All of that isn't a big deal if they weren't so fucking smug. Lets face it, if you pretend to be flawless you'd better be ready for a shitstorm when you show some warts.

Funny thing is that the shitstorm hasn't started yet despite all of the problems. I'm curious to see how long Google & Apple will keep being immune to public scorn for crappy products and elitist attitudes.

Cool

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

The answer to the secret

There's this book and video called 'The Secret' that purports to let anybody in on the secret of success. I hate the book and think that it's a load of crap and actually destructive in a sense. It lets losers justify their lethargic underachieving lives so that they can continue to sit on the couch watching their bellybuttons waiting for gold to pop out if they believe it enough because some mystical force is going to deliver it to them. I think you have a better chance of U2 playing live in your rectum than being successful just by wishing it to be.

And so...

There's a follow up book by one of the contributors - a Canadian named John Assaraf that's actually pretty interesting. This book ('The Answer') is about taking action and getting your fat lazy ass off your filthy couch. Although it still refers back to the Chopra-esque inter connectivity of all things and quantum power wells, it does so just to tell you to get off your lard bags and start taking action. I'm not finished reading it but it seems to be quite accurate and rational and so far I'd say that it's a pretty good asset for those starting or running their own gigs.

Here it is on Amazon.

One Voice One Will

Mark Ronson

Mark Ronson seems to have the golden touch these days, here's his new it girls video - Candie Payne/I Wish.

Here's All I need to hear from CP, no video unfortunately;




And if you like that smokey soul sound, here's another one from Saint Etienne;



Thanks to Fred Perry/Subculture for getting me back on this stuff.

Subculture Radio

Fred Perry has some great radio stations under their subcultures brand. Here's one of them.

Siouxsie

I was reading an interview with Siouxsie from this past winter in which she goes on in detail about what a good time she had vacationing in Sri Lanka, scuba diving and hanging out with monkeys. I found that really striking because she was always portrayed as such a severe and serious character sometimes like a spinning ball of razorblades if you crossed her line. While I couldn't imagine her drinking mojitos and dancing to Andre 3000 around the Hilton pool, I understand where she was coming from and for the most part I'd much rather be hanging out with monkeys and manta rays than the urban monkeys I'm forced to hang out with most of the time.

Speaking of manta rays, I was in Costa Rica recently and saw a ray that was much larger than our 20 foot panga (boat), looked like a huge cloud passing underneath. It really gave me shivers and at the same time was breathtaking. I've never seen such a huge creature up close.

Oh yeah, by coincidence, Siouxsie's newest album was called Manta Ray, here's "Into a Swan" (2007):



And here's a really awesome live clip with Suede from 1993;

My Spring Vacation