The past couple of days has given us headlines like “White House Takes Heat Over Shooting Disclosure” (ABC News). But I see that headline and read “White House has Cheney Shoot a Guy to Take the Heat off of Them for the Whole Orwell Thing”.
Yeah, call me paranoid, but would that not be good strategy? The wiretapping story is now at #12 on Google News’ US news section. Another interesting note – four of the top twelve stories on the US news section are about the White House getting in trouble.
Alyssa and I ventured to Chinatown this past Saturday a couple of times. I love all the little stores there. There are neat little bakeries, candy stores, tea stores, and stores with assorted knick knacks.
So we went into a candy store. I got “pineapple gummies” and “apple gummies”. I saved the packages, because the writing on the front of the packages is just great. Check it out:
APPLE GUMMY
Every drop of fresh apple juice, carefully pressed from the reddest apples, shining in colors of the cheeks of a snow-country child, is yours to enjoy in each soft and juicy Kasugai Apple Gummy.PINEAPPLE GUMMY
The gorgeous taste of fully ripened pineapple, imposing as a southern island king crowned in glory, is yours to enjoy in every soft and juicy Kasugai Pineapple Gummy.
Yum.
I often see people refer to work hours as “9 to 5”. Who the hell works these hours? Almost everyone gets a lunch break, usually one hour. And you still have to work 8 hours, so shouldn’t we say something like “8 to 5” or “9 to 6” as the standard work hours?
Damn old sayings…sometimes they stick around even though they don’t make sense anymore. Either that or I am missing something.
Do you ever get the feeling that you’re paying for nothing?
Software and data in general is an artificial product created by our laws. We can sit here and argue about whether these laws benefit or harm society. But I’m not going to do that.
What is a valid product is the service of creating data. You can surely pay someone to create data that does or says what you want it to. But why is it that it is against the law to transmit this data to some unauthorized party? Something just seems inherently unnatural about this. Support is also a valid product. You create software for someone and then charge them to support it.
I think this is partly the basis for the free software movement.
Hell, I don’t even know if I agree with all of this myself. I have recently shelled out $189 for VMWare, when I could have easily just pirated it. I guess it is because I feel like they deserve my money. It is a good product. But at the same time, I see this as a donation in the sense that it doesn’t make sense that it should cost money once it is already written. I mean, other than the negligible cost of their bandwidth, it cost them nothing extra to “allow” me to download their software. In other words, I wouldn’t have felt particularly bad if I had pirated the software. I only would have felt as bad as, say, listening to free Internet radio without donating any money.
Of course, the software and entertainment industry wants us to believe that each time you illegally download software, music, movies, or some other sort of data, they are somehow losing money. Sure, some of the people that did it illegally would have otherwise paid for what they downloaded. But they would have you believe that a college student, had they not been able to download $250 Photoshop and $10,000 worth of music, would have paid for it.
Give me a break. More on free software to come (free as in speech, and free as in beer).
I didn’t intend for this post to start off this way, but a thought has come to mind. I am very glad I decided not to get a TV when I moved. My motivation was not that there isn’t anything good on TV. Surely, there could be a lot more good content. But this wasn’t my main issue with TV. My issue is the advertising. And if you have been reading this blog somewhat regularly, you will know how I feel about advertising and subscriptions.
But anyway, I don’t intend to get all high and mighty like…”Oh, you watch TV? I don’t. In fact, I don’t even have a TV.” The reason I am glad I don’t have one is because if I did, I would watch it as a default activity to do, out of habit. I, of course, still subject myself to the same mind-numbing content as everyone that owns a TV. I illegally download plenty of TV shows and watch them on my computer. But not having a TV and cable just makes that default habit-induced urge go away. Now when I want something to do to relax by myself at home, instead of reaching for the remote, a beer, and a bowl of peanuts, I reach for a book, a beer (well, actually, usually Diet Coke, juice, or water), and a bowl of peanuts. And I have always wanted to read more.
That brings up another point. Question all assumptions. When people think of the different rooms in their home, and think of what they need to have in them, I think there is a preset list in their minds. It is nice to be able to think of living without a certain thing, and come to the realization that you either don’t need or want that certain thing. This might be a function of the size of my apartment where I kind of need to cut back on some of the things that are found in almost every home in America. So I don’t have a microwave in my kitchen. Again, I am not trying to get all high and mighty here. I am certainly just protecting myself from myself. Because I’d rather not use a microwave, but if there was one there, I’d use it. But things, I think, taste better when heated up on the stove or in the oven. And it really isn’t much extra effort at all.
But now I would like to move on to the main idea I wanted to get across tonight. I hope you’ve made it this far. Back to the reading thing. It is rather remarkable how something like a book can change your life, or at least your outlook on life. A few books have done this for me over the past few years.
First, it was the Ralph Nader biography, Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon, that I read a couple of summers ago. That made me realize that there really is a lot that one person can accomplish just with hard work alone. Surely, it isn’t easy doing what Ralph Nader has done. But it is rather obvious what you need to do to bring about change. Work your ass off. Devote yourself to what you believe in. These are simple concepts, but difficult in practice.
Secondly, this book motivated me to start volunteering some of my time. I volunteered for the 2004 Nader campaign. This was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. And it made me realize how good it makes me feel to devote even a little bit of time every week to something I believe in.
A few months ago, I finished reading The Fountainhead. The book was maybe a bit over simplistic, but it also made me realize some things. You shouldn’t spend your life compromising yourself. Make sure you are doing something you love doing for a living. Of course, this is not something that is very easy to accomplish, but at least I realize this as a goal and I am working on acheiving it.
Currently, I am reading Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. This book has really opened my eyes in terms of how the world works. I am sure I still have a ton of learning to do, but I think I am starting to see things a bit more clearly. It also contains tons of references to other books and articles. In fact, the footnotes are longer than the book itself. This book is a collection of discussions that Chomsky has had over the years. These aren’t prepared speeches. Someone will ask him a question or propose a discussion point, and Chomsky answers. Every single one of his answers reads like a thorough essay, but this is stuff off of the top of his head.
He has a lot to say about the nature of power, the media, state-sponsored terrorism, propoganda, and a wealth of other subjects. I can’t really give a fitting summary to this book. You’ll just have to pick it up and read it.
Now all this isn’t to say that I read a lot per se. In fact, I read quite slowly. Alyssa gave me Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky for Festivus, and a month and a half later I am still reading it. It is a 400-page book. But I do enjoy reading often, even if it is only a few pages a day when I am trying to fall asleep. It keeps me thinking.
I really wish I had discovered books like these years ago. Because of this, I am going to start a page of recommended books, so that perhaps someone else can discover these books much earlier than I did. This is not to say that I have some amazing taste in books – this list should be taken with a rather large grain of salt.
With all this recent talk of domestic spying, we’ve been hearing some pretty interesting things about how the NSA and the federal government operate. Most of these facts aren’t new to anyone, especially me. But the recent happenings have gotten me thinking nonetheless.
The NSA has taps on every major information pipe in the country. This isn’t even a secret.
You are restricted on the level of encryption you are allowed to use in this country. You aren’t allowed to use an encryption key larger than 256 bits. Why? Because the NSA wants to be able to crack your communications if they choose to.
Well, my viewpoint on all of this is not only does the government not have an inherent right to monitor my communications, but I have an inherent right to my own privacy. There is a concept called “innocent until proven guilty”, which isn’t always practiced in this country. Many people will say “Well, why does it matter if your communications are being monitored? If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.” Yeah? Well on the same note, if I am assumed innocent then the government also has nothing to worry about.
Why does the federal government get this special place in our lives that they evidently have a right to know everything we say and do? I personally call for civil disobedience. Use methods such as anonymizers to protect your identity (tutorial here). Use strong encryption to protect your communications. It is a shame that these technologies aren’t built-in to our everyday communication systems.
I don’t want to hear another politician bitch about the budget until we fix this:
I have been having some really strange dreams lately. They are strange because they are vivid.
Today, during my lunch-break nap, I dreamt that Cuba was no longer a Communist country, and that Nelson Mandela had become its president. There were all these Cuban people that decided to come to the United States now that they were allowed to. They decided that San Francisco would be a good city to swim up to.
And I had another dream where I was explaining the finer points of the encryption software that my company sells to a customer. I was talking about how you can use your current deployment method to push out our installation MSI. Nerd dream.
And another one where I beat the crap out of the guy (dream part) that wanted to beat me up because his wife was hitting on me (real life part from this weekend). He was coming at her with a spatula.
Hello, my name is Stu and I am a computer addict.
I keep a wish list on my personal wiki. I started this because I found myself always buying little things and never being able to save up for the big-ticket items that I really wanted. I figured if I wrote down what I really wanted, I would be able to save up for it. It is working, at least a little bit.
Anyway, so my wish list is kind of crazy. On it, I have the following:
I am kind of glad that I am not rich. Because if I was, I would spend a lot of damn money.
I’ve started to realize that I am going to be a picky bastard when it comes to working. I already have a short list of requirements, and the list will get longer in the next few years:
current requirements:
future requirements:
So the point of all this is, I would gladly trade a better salary for having all of these requirements fulfilled. Hopefully within a few years I will be able to accomplish all of these things.