Not Disenchanted

4:34pm: Five Thousand Miles Out

A few months ago I went to iTunes Music store and purchased some tracks from the album "Tubular Vibes", which is a tribute album to Mike Oldfield's music. The stuff on there is a lot of decent electronica remixes of Oldfield's music.

I go back there to buy the rest of the tracks today and find that I can't. They've removed the whole album from the iTunes store. Bit of a disappointment.

So I try an experiment. On the iTunes store front page there's a bubbalicious icon with the flag of the country you're in. Clicking it gets you to a menu of all the international iTunes stores. I buzzed over to the British store and browsed for Mike Oldfield there, discovering a large amount of material I'd like to get. Far more Oldfield than you'll see in the US iTunes store.

But, to my despair, I can't buy anything there. I need a UK iTunes account to buy it, and attempting to create one failed when I couldn't provide a credit card with a billing address in the UK.

I was born in the UK, and I can't buy a song from there. For homework, you all have to find out what perverted twist of licensing and contracts can prevent the licensor from making a sale.

3:13am: Learning when you didn't mean to

I didn't feel bad when Rodney Dangerfield died, but I guess I did feel shock when a name pops up in the news that kind of sad way and you weren't expecting it. Many years ago, when still in High School, I dreamed of publishing a humor magazine called "Disconnected". I posted requests for submissions on local dial-up bulletin boards (BBSes) and on newsgroups with the AOL account I had back in 1993. I got in touch with people far and wide who sent in ideas and jokes.
Then one day someone said they had a chance to tell Rodney Dangerfield about it, and he asked if he was going to get any respect. I really don't know if this is true, but please let me imagine it was.

Until yesterday I thought the song "The Way It Is" by Bruce Hornsby was about unemployment. I kept hearing it in the background of superstores and gyms as it got played on muzak systems or someone's radio, or in the soundtrack of a TV show. But then I decided to just go and buy it from iTunes. Then I decided to go look up the lyrics on the Internet.

I've been doing that a lot lately. You can type in the name of the song, the artist (if you know it), and the word "lyrics" and your first hit will be one of the many song lyrics sites that have it. On impulse I discovered the true meaning of so many songs that I became hooked, addicted to mining the anthropology of pop culture with a radio and a search engine.

Because it's easy to mishear lyrics, I found learned more than I thought I would about...

Paul Simon's Me and Julio down by the Schoolyard.
Blue Oyster Cult's Don't Fear The Reaper.
Deep Forest's Sweet Lullaby
Elton John's A Song for Guy.
Jethro Tull's Pibroch
Paul Simon's Boy in the Bubble.
Police's King of Pain.
Simon & Garfunkel's The Boxer.
Three Dog Night's Never Been To Spain.
After The Fire's Der Kommissar.
BeeGee's Stayin' Alive.
Dream Theater's Surrounded.
Ofra Haza's Love Song.

And Bruce Hornsby's The Way It Is.

"Well they passed a law in '64 to give those who "ain't got" a little more, but it only goes so far. Because the law can't change another's mind when all it sees at the hiring time is the line on the color bar."

The law they passed in 64 was the biggest civil rights bill since the thirteenth amendment. It came on the heels of a tragedy in Birmingham, Alabama that involved four little girls.

The reason I was listening to "The Way It Is" is because I unintentionally watched a bit of "Smallville" last night, and it was playing in the background. Smallville is not a show I watch, it just came after "Ferris Buller's Day Off" last night on the same channel.

That was what prompted me to go and buy the song, look up its lyrics, and discover something I didn't know. Accidental learning. Learning when you didn't mean to.

Smallville is a show about Superman as a young man. Well Superman died tonight, and I learned, with surprise, that not only did I feel shock to know Christopher Reeve was dead, but it hurt me too.

I was really hoping he'd get better someday.

6:56pm: How to win a debate

If you want to win a debate, follow these rules:

1: Do not get into a debate.

2: If you break rule #1, chose a debate that has already been won, then simply join the winning side. EG: don't join a debate on creation vs. evolution on the side of the creationists.

3: Do not get into a debate.

4: If you break rule #2, chose a debate where you have the skill to produce your own evidence. EG: do not get into a debate about astronomy unless you are an astronomer with access to a telescope.

5: Do not get into a debate.

6: There is no rule 6.

7: Do not get into a debate.

8: If you break rule #4, chose a forum for the debate where you can spend time between responses doing thinking and research. EG: do it on a bulletin board where the latency between responses can be a day or more. AND ALWAYS SLEEP ON YOUR RESPONSES BEFORE POSTING THEM.

9: Do not get into a debate.

10: If you break rules 2, 4 and 8, then you better be a presidential candidate, because you can't lose a debate anyway as long as you look good doing it.

2:30pm: Eye in the sky

Slashdot recently discovered a free, downloadable program developed by NASA called World Wind, which is a satellite image explorer. Its user interface is the most logical possible: a spinnable, zoomable globe. You find the country and region you want to explore by spinning the globe with your mouse, then zooming in on it. In the background, the program downloads satellite photography of the region you're getting close to.

This makes the program a Grade A Nifty Toy, because most people won't have a practical need for that kind of information, but it's awfully fun to play with. You can also grab satellite images of recent storms, floods and fires, and I guarantee you'll get a "wow" by grabbing, say, a picture of hurricane Frances engulfing Florida--a photograph which is mapped perfectly over the curving surface of the program's user interface.

But there's one feature that makes the program immediately practical for ordinary folk, and another which inspires me to think of a better version.

The first one, which makes it practical for you and me, is a topographical map mode. Click the button to turn it on, and the program will download street maps of what you're looking at. These are USGS (US Geological Survey) maps, which don't have a lot of the user-friendly features that consumer roadmaps do--such as clearly defined highway numbers (you can find them, but they aren't big and bold icons like Hagstrom's maps have). In a pinch, however, these maps are great and you could plan a road trip with them.

The program uses a "progressing resolution" way of updating the screen, which means it grabs low-resolution pictures first in order to update the screen quickly. Then it slices the view into rectangles and spends the time to download higher resolution pictures the closer you zoom in. This means that you can see a map of major roads and features almost as soon as you've zoomed in to the county level, and then see rectangles of the screen highlighted and updated a moment later with detailed maps that can display individual residential streets (right down to the "I can find my house" level--which I did).

This is probably the best free road atlas program you'll ever have. It doesn't appear to have maps for any locations outside of the United States, but as a consolation it does have an extremely detailed catalog of place names.

The second feature that got my blood pumping was the "Animated Earth" mode, which is a catalog of animations made from sequences of satellite photographs made over time (spanning hours, or days, or months or longer). The animations are presented mapped over the globe UI, so you can rotate and zoom while they're playing. Imagine watching clouds drifting slowly across the southern hemisphere, and being able to rotate your view of the globe to watch the termination line of the sun's shine slowly migrate across the ocean.

However, I don't really care to watch clouds drifting over Australia. What I really would like to see is a real-time view of Earth.

The program is just a very specialized database viewer. The source of its data is 2D photographs, diagrams and videos that are distorted to fit over the 3D curvature of the primary user interface widget (the globe). These pictures are saved with Earth coordinates so the program can fit them into the jigsaw puzzle precisely. The majority of the computational grunt-work takes place on your computer, because the program has to deform the photo/animation on-the-fly to fit whatever perspective you've spun the globe to at the time.

It does this to create an illusion: that you have the Eye of God and a single camera is taking all of the pictures as it hovers over the planet's surface, ready to zoom in, change its angle, or fly off to another point in Earth's orbit. In fact there is no single camera but thousands of them. They're on satellites, spy planes, and even the imaginary camera of a cartographer making a street map.

So there are only three things that prevent you from creating "World Wind II", a program that shows a real-time view of Earth:

1. Saturation of cameras (getting enough of them to look at every square mile of Earth all of the time). These cameras also do not have to be mounted on satellites, since the video from stationary cameras (like the ones on poles that monitor highways) can be deformed to fit the viewpane.


2. Bandwidth to deliver real-time video (you won't need to stream the whole Earth to each viewer, only whatever is sufficient for the view-pane and zoom factor)


3. Political obstacles (privacy, secrecy, and intellectual property)

But here's what you could do with such a program.

• Explore the roads you take for your commute each morning to see which ones are congested.


• Watch a storm brewing or aiming for you.


• See North Korea being mischievous.


• See how close the forest fire or flood is to your house.


• See if your loved ones are close to such disasters.


• Monitor the state of a mob, protest march, or parade.


• Watch the construction of a new building


• Put all of the above into geographical context

I imagine a program with all that and a "rewind" button so you can go look at the video history of the Earth's topographical events unfold, all mapped onto the simplest possible User Interface for looking at the Earth's surface. That would kick ass.

11:04am: Always On, Part II

Sony has made a hybrid still/video camera that will automatically record several seconds of video before and after you take a still shot. (Imagine getting the "before and after" of General Nguyen Loan disciplining a Vietcong, or rather, imagine if the photographer hadn't clicked the shutter just in time).

The next thought I had was what it would be like if the video storage capacities of cameras grew so huge they exceeded the MTTF (Mean-Time-To-Failure) of the camera itself. A camera with a hard drive could store a lot of video, and while hard drive capacities are doubling every couple of years, the space requirements for video are fixed.

Sometime in the future, you're going to get hard drives that could store years of video at TV--and later--HDTV resolutions. So if the expected lifespan of the camera (its MTTF) is shorter, you could have a camera that's "always on", and you'd change the function of the shutter button to set bookmarks in the stream.

And then I realized that batteries are still just as short-lived as they were twenty years ago, and aren't getting any better. Aw shoot. Will somebody please invent a portable atomic power source already?

7:55pm: Casual AIM

A little earlier today a stranger decided to start an impromptu chat with me on AIM.

It happens from time to time that I'll get an instant message from someone I don't recognize right away, but they turn out to be someone I know, or is on my friends list or whatever and I'll happily chat with them.

But I realized that I'm not sure how to respond to a total stranger. I think with LiveJournal and AIM I'm tapping into some communities that I didn't know were communities, meaning: I don't think I know what the culture is for these things. Strangers instant-messaging each other might be common practice with AIM and I just don't know it.

So I blew off this person, only after trying to find out if they were someone I already knew first. Maybe this is rude in the AIM community, (I thought it was rude for a stranger to go around interrupting people, but I'd probably get alarmed by what goes on every day in Cairo, where "personal space" doesn't exist).

It occurred to me that this started after I put my AIM screen name in my LiveJournal profile. So I think I'll change my mind halfway; I'll chat with a stranger only if they tell me they're a stranger and don't pretend to be offended when I ask them who they are. Otherwise I get this uncomfortable feeling that someone is trying to pull off a feat of social engineering on me.

(And I was eating lunch in a Borders cafe... which implies that I failed to not subscribe to that T-Mobile WiFi service I mentioned in the last post).

4:21pm: WarDriving

Last night I hijacked a neighbor's internet connection with my Powerbook.

"WarDriving" is the act of driving around a neighborhood with a laptop or some other portable computer listening for open wireless internet connections. The etymology of the word comes from the movie WarGames, where a young Matthew Broderick plays a kid who discovers telephone lines into other computers by having his computer dial every number in an exchange and make a note of the ones answered by a computer.

So if you wanted to know if there were any good targets in the '555' exchange, you'd set up your computer to dial phone numbers 555-0001 through 555-9999. In the movie, this is how Broderick's character discovers an open line into the army computer that controls the North American missile defense.

Unfortunately, "WarDialing" is illegal in most states, and it's trivial for a phone company to tell that you're doing it--there's no legitimate reason to dial every phone number in an exchange for a couple of seconds each time unless you're a registered telemarketer.

But now the prefix of "War" gets appended to every new technique that comes along for discovering hidden computer access points, hence "WarDriving" and "WarWalking", both of which came into existence shortly after people began installing WiFi wireless internet relays in their homes. See, these boxes, which retail for under $100, let you share your internet connection with multiple computers equipped with a WiFi receiver. The implicit suggestion is that these computers are your own, but all of these devices come with security and authorization features turned off by default, and most people don't bother turning them on. After buying the relay, they do the minimum to get them working and then forget about it.

Which means that if you set up your WiFi enabled laptop on the passenger seat of your car, start up a "WarDriver" or "Stumbler" program to turn on the antenna and listen, and then drive around slowly for a while, you can discover a patchwork of open wireless access points. Each of these is configured to hand out an IP address to any computer that asks for it, making the task of borrowing someone else's Internet connection rather trivial.

This is what I did last night at about 2am. After finding about a dozen open hotspots around my neighborhood, I picked one to tap into and do a bit of surfing.

What I wish I knew is whether that neighbor is unaware their internet connection can be borrowed by a stranger, or if they are aware and simply don't care.

With a DSL or Cable Modem connection, bandwidth is abundant and easily shared without a noticeable drain for the owner. Furthermore, the wireless relay itself does not make it possible to snoop on the owner's computer, only tap into the same party line. There has been the problem that accessing someone's Internet connection through their WiFi relay gets you in behind their firewall, but this problem is slowly evaporating as the computers themselves come with their own firewalls.

It's entirely likely that even if you ran a campaign to educate WiFi users about surreptitious users, a significant number of them would still leave their access points wide open and smile: when no harm or inconvenience is incurred, it feels charitable to let others borrow your resources. It can even develop into a minor gift economy.

Where does this lead? Well, something I also did last night was drive to the parking lot of a Starbucks and investigate the WiFi service they now offer in all of their stores. The service is metered through T-Mobile, and it costs $29/month. That's exactly $29/month more than it cost me to find a house with an open connection and borrow it for a while, and houses with WiFi relays are a hundred times more abundant than even Starbucks Lets-Put-A-Coffee-Shop-On-Every-Street-Corner is.

What I know now is that if I'm stuck away from home and I need to use the Internet urgently, all I have to do is fire up the WarDriving program and cruise the nearest residential area for a few minutes. Why should I sign-up for a commercial service?

Ah, I know why, it's because someone is going to take all those free residential access points and turn those into metered access points.

Bastards.

5:08am: Powerbook

I've got a birthday coming up in a few days, and as an early gift for myself I bought an Apple Powerbook with 15" screen. Strictly speaking, it's a business expense that just happens to be something I really wanted anyway.

Until recently I didn't have a use for a laptop because whenever I got out of the apartment, working on a computer was the last thing on my mind. But it's been getting easier to justify it lately, thanks to a lot of road trips I've been making for customers and the problem of showing them my work.

The final straw was when a customer asked me to start doing work on-site (as in, traveling to their offices) on a weekly basis. Spending a whole day a week on-site means I'll need my own computer handy in case an urgent request from another customer comes up (it's a stipulation in the contract that I get to address other customer requests when they come up).

So why a Powerbook?

That ought to be easy, they're gorgeous. They took off all the blinky lights, all the crazy switches and other crap that get stuffed onto PC laptops, and replaced them with smooth aluminum. And I wouldn't have been able to appreciate that properly if I hadn't been reading a few books about design lately.

The first is Designing Visual Interfaces by Kevin Mullet and Darrel Sano. The relevant gem I learned from the book is that a designer does a lot of his work by removing things until he can't take away anything more without defeating the function of whatever it is. Take road signs for example: there's always a ton of verbiage you could add to a road sign, like "This bend is really sharp, so slow down to 30mph", but if all signs were written like this, you'd never glean the most crucial information before your car zipped past it. So the designer strips away one word at a time until he can't take away any more. Now the sign simply says "30 MPH", and that's it.

This is what it looks like the designers of the Powerbook did with all those status lights you find on other laptops. Like:

Do you really need a power light? Come on, if you took it out, you'd still know if the laptop was on because the screen would be. (There's a "sleep mode" light that throbs steadily when you close the lid, but it's off when the lid is open).

And how about a hard-drive light? What would happen if you got rid of it? The user wouldn't know when the computer is swapping pages of virtual memory out to the disk? He wouldn't know it's reading a program off the disk after he just clicked its icon? He wouldn't know his document is being saved after he clicks on the "Save" button? Dumb questions! *Poof* goes the hard drive light.

Of the lights that are present, they've been put in the most intuitive places. Such as the lighted bezel around the power adaptor jack. It glows orange when the battery is recharging, and green when the battery is full. The battery life indicator is on the battery itself, too: push a button mounted on the battery on the bottom of the unit and a series of lights come on to tell you how much charge it has left.

Someone went over the initial blueprints of this machine and started striking out buttons, lights, status displays and other bits and pieces until the only things left were the lights, switches and buttons that had to be there.

The other book I've been reading is The Inmates Are Running The Asylum: Why High-Tech products Drive Us Crazy And How To Restore The Sanity by Alan Cooper. The key concept of this book is something called Interaction Design, which is analogous to architecture, and somewhat to industrial design.

The contention of Cooper's book is that software developers almost always start developing a new application by firing up an editor and a compiler and start writing code, inventing the user interface as they go along. Later in the project someone says "Oh, we should do some usability testing", and run a few tests with sample users that reveal how truly awful the design of the product is so far. However, by this time it's far too late to fix it properly. Some "usability enhancements" are made by shifting buttons and other screen elements around, but the product is still confusing and hard to learn.

The cure is to design the way a computer program will interact with its user long before coding begins.

Some tools to aid this are a small set of very specific "personas"--which are descriptions of hypothetical users, given in such detail that the persona is like a real person to the developers. "Sally" may be the primary user, and her persona might indicate things like how many children she has, what she does for a living, what time she gets home from work and so-on. The point is to help with the feature elimination stage I described above. Does Sally need the option to print reports in Landscape mode? If not, then that feature gets killed on paper before it ever gets committed to code.

Some programmers object to this specificity, citing edge-cases where some other hypothetical user might want to print in landscape mode, and the value of having "Sally" is so you can beat that programmer over the head with her. Programmers should always handle edge cases in their code--like what should happen if it's fed corrupted data--but it's not their place to handle edge cases in the design.

And since using the Mac software on the Powerbook, I think that the basic principles Cooper describes were used in their design, too. The bundled applications are not a cornucopia of features and widgets, most are as unadorned as the Powerbook itself. However, each one does its job very well. That's not the impression I get from most Windows and Linux software, and I'm very interested in the difference.

I could ruin the meaning of this post by talking about Mac Vs. Windows, winnarz and l00serz, PowerPC vs. Intel, Market Share, Operating System purity and other bullshit, but I had all that burned out of me during the "OS/2 years".

I've got a Linux desktop, and a Windows XP desktop, and now I have a Mac laptop. I bought it because I like it.

Powerb00ks r00l, yo.

12:29pm: Spoken like a Gentleman

This weeks's essay, Clear as mud, is an editorial cleverly disguised as a science-fiction short story. It has space battles, romance, ballistics and kinetics all at sub-lightspeed.

12:29pm: The value of words

I started placing Google AdWords on Disenchanted today, using their AdSense program. Google says that they match ads with the content of the page they appear on, using a secret algorithm to divine the meaning of the page.

I shan't see for a while how effective they are for me, but I've already noticed some interesting guesses that Google's algorithm is making:

1. 2 + 2's heavy numbers attract ads for eBay sales strategies and ESPN magazine. (Must think it's about statistics or something)


2. Formula for success, an essay about genetic and social factors in individual success, attracts ads for maids and cleaning services. This is probably because a company called Chicago Maid Service was abusing the backlinking system, and Google decided the keywords in the backlinks were more important than the words in the essay.


3. Someone you don't know is about spam, and the ads matched with this are right on the button. Score one for the Googlemeister.


4. There ain't nothin' on TV is about decision making. Google matches this with ads for executive decision making software. Boo-yah.


5. Early Prototype... features an annecdote from Steven Jay Gould about a plumber who believed in flood geology. Naturally, the ads center on either water leak alarms, or the Creationism/Evolution debate. Well, gotta cover all the bases, I guess.

There's more, of course. Some of the ads appear to be pretty well matched and might actually appeal to some of those who read the articles. But the main reason I put them up is because after three years, many articles have attained a very high search engine footprint and get a lot of hits (and I'm an unapologetic capitalist). "Wassup, mah nigger?" in particular is the most-viewed essay on the site month-to-month, because it scores high on searches for "wassup" (4th place on Google) and "nigger" (6th place).

(Now, don't go look at some of my old writing that criticizes advertising, it just looks silly now ;-)

12:29pm: Postah

Some people who liked the artwork for this week's Disenchanted article remarked that they'd love to get a high-resolution print of it. Smelling an opportunity, here, I opened up Adobe Illustrator and produced a high-resolution poster featuring not only the illustration (in the highest resolution electricgecko gave it to me in: 2926x2228 pixels), but Pi worked out to 2,160 digits as well.

The poster can be purchased from Disenchanted's Cafe Press Store in two sizes:

• 23 x 35 (Large) for $23.99


• 16 x 20 (Small) for $17.99

(And if you'd like to know what Pi is worked out to 1,000,000 places...)

9:59pm: When will then be now?

Soon!

I had to take a break so I could start a new career and new business. Since I've been quiet for a while, I figured my next essay should answer a big question, like oh, uh... how does the universe exist?

9:20pm: Cahlifornya and Minne-soh-dah

It occurs to me that if Arnold gets elected to replace Grey Davis, then Predator will be the only movie that stars two state governors.

12:48am:

I've left my LiveJournal unmaintained because I switched from FreeBSD to Linux (better hardware support and I can run WineX to play SimCity 4) and I've been too lazy/busy, until now, to reinstall the LiveJournal client I use.

Some short news:

1) Bought new car. It's a 2003 Saturn Ion 3 'Quad Coupe' and looks like this:

It has variable transmission, All Of The Options, and I've put 4000 miles on it in two months.

2) Attended Anthrocon. As usual I had fun, but on sunday night I also got toasted. Someone introduced me to a drink called a 'Wedding cake' which has three ingredients in equal quantities: vanilla vodka, tripple-sec, and pineapple juice. It goes down like kool-aid and fucks you up. I had five. I've been told I don't act obviously drunk when I am (too damn introspective is my guess, although that would probably run out on six or seven), but I definitely wasn't the same ol' same 'ol.

The next morning my stomach took a look at breakfast and said, "hmmmm... nope," then sent it via the Esophagus Courier to Sewer Central. I had to call the hotel's front desk manager and beg for another hour to check-out while I finished shouting 'Europe' at the sink.

This is a damn shame because I was having fun while the room span. Luckily I didn't get completely hammered the way someone else at the same party did. He had seven wedding cakes and was ready to marry the mother-in-law by the time he lurched into the bathroom and Spoke Lunch.

Somewhere between me and the lush on the intoxication thermometer was another guy who was pretty much a virgin to hard liquor and completely unprepared for the Absolut medicine. After three drinks he was telling me Way Too Much Personal History. Fortunately I was sober enough to plant a glass of water in his hand, get him to tell me his hotel room number, walk him back there and make sure he got into bed.

"Do you think I'll be alright?" he asked me before keeling over.

"Don't worry," I said, imparting a bit of old wisdom, "you can think of the human body as like a big fault recovery system. I'm sure your liver knows what to do."

Of course, as I discovered the next morning, part of that fault recovery includes "purge mode". Both ends, too. Ow!

6:18pm: Psychotic anime series

electricgecko has just reminded me that I still have the last two DVDs of Serial Experiments Lain to watch. Lain is one of the un-anime I found on my quest to get into the Anime genre some time ago. It is the antithesis of the Sturgeons Quantity of Anime I waded through to find it. To date, there's very little Anime I like, because of these recurring factors:

1. Hyperactive child characters who have only two expressions: bewilderment and "Heeeere's Johnny!"


2. Adolescent or pre-adolescent girl characters who frequently emit high-pitched squeals that only your dog and your teeth can hear.


3. English dubs that have to cram too many syllables into each character's turn to speak, and therefore sound rushed.


4. English dubs that cram too much exposition into the dialog, and therefore sound patronizing.

I think I could enjoy more Anime if they didn't have the above spoiling factors. Fortunately, thanks to DVD technology, I can usually eliminate the last two by listening to the original Japaneese dialog and reading English subtitles. Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke) was translated into English very well because they edited the original film to give English dialog enough room to fit into spaces originally timed for japaneese, then picked some actors like Billy Crudup who have voices pleasant to listen to. According to the credits, we've got Neil Gaiman to thank for that.

Lain wasn't translated that way, so when I watch it I have the soundtrack set to Japaneese and I read the subtitles. I've tried watching it with the English dub, which isn't too bad, but I just wasn't comfortable with that. Lain has adolescent girl characters in it, but they aren't hyperactive and don't squeal. In fact, Lain's style is subdued.

Lain is also werid as fuck, and that makes me like it even more. Horay for psychotic Anime!

5:53pm: Paraphrasing George Michael: I want your socks

I've just discovered that yesterday's suit salesman forgot to sell me socks. I think I'd better pick some up after I go back to pick up the suit from its alterations, because I'm going to look really stupid wearing swank leather dress shoes with a pair of white fluffy athletic tube socks stickin' out of them.

There are some things left over from the experience that I still don't understand, like:

1. Why are you always supposed to leave the bottom button of the blazer unbuttoned? This bothers me because I hate pseudo-functional decorations. I hate decorative window shutters that are nailed open. I hate decorative keyholes on a chest of draws that can't be locked. Now I've gotta wear a suit with a button I could fasten but aren't supposed to. But worse yet:


2. the pockets on suit blazers are real pockets, but they're sewn shut so you can't put stuff in them and make them baggy-looking over time. Why don't they just remove the pockets?


3. They told me I should get cuffs on the pant legs because if I get them cut straight and later want cuffs, there isn't enough fabric to make the alteration. Why the blue blazes do I want cuffs in the first place? Is there some advantage to carrying a band of folded-up fabric around your ankles?


4. They told me that the fewer buttons the blazer has, the more modern it is. So if your suit has two buttons and mine has three then mine is an older fashion, but then the salesman tells me that three-button suits have become more fashionable "in the last 10 years". Also: if they go down to one-button suits, and I button it up, will that conflict with the last-button rule from above? Will they invent technology to button up one-button suits but still let you leave the last button unbuttoned for fashion correctness?


5. Can I wear my suit "desert fashion?"

9:44pm: Dressed to maim

Today I bought a suit.

NO! Today I bought TWO suits.

NO! Today I bought two suits and dress shoes, shirts and ties, all for way too much money.

I wanted to give Mens Warehouse a try, because I have a business meeting coming up in a few days and didn't have suitable attire. The thing is they advertise suits on television for $200 and I thought I could do that, and probably go up another hundred, since I have no need for a suit except on rare occasions--yet didn't want to look like I got mine out of a crackerjack box. But I have an affliction doctors have not found a cure for yet: I'm an easy sell. So lets just say I went up a bit higher than another hundred and leave it at that.

I showed up in shorts and t-shirt, a bit sweaty from the weather outside today. I've developed a method for buying things I've never bought before and know nothing about, and it's to:

1. Walk in to store.


2. Stand well enough within the store to definitely be in it, close enough to the door to definitely not be in danger of buying anything yet, and look at the merchandise with interest. This causes a salesperson to beeline in your direction.


3. They will ask you "Can I help you, sir?"


4. And because you have money and you are not Just Looking you will say "Yes, I know diddly about [cars|printers|suits|women], but I need one now."

This is good for getting what you want, however, DO NOT USE THE ABOVE TECHNIQUE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES because after you're done the salesman will have everything he wants, too.

What you want to do instead is say "I just need a simple dark gray suit" and get out of there fast as soon as they've finished selling it to you. Next you will want to go to a completely different store to get your shirts and shoes and ties, because if you let the salesperson think, for just one moment, that you need a wardrobe then you're in deep shit.

Since this was a full service suit store, I also had to try on the suits and have a tailor mark up alterations. I have shoulders that don't slope much, so when I put on a blazer from off the rack, I get this flap of fabric just under the back of my neck. But getting marked up by a tailor isn't much fun, because the example I just gave you is probably the only place a man is comfortable with another man's hands being near. Everywhere else had to be tugged and pulled and gripped so the tailor could leave some chalk marks, and I had to do this twice (the salesman wanted me to try on three suits, even though he was only set on selling me two. The reason he wanted to have me try three is because one of the two suits I liked was cheaper).

Another factor I've noticed is, in conjunction with some people's belief--including mine--that suits are an investment, that store credit cards are also pushed heavily. This makes perfect sales sense: if you want to over-sell a customer by talking him into buying more than he came in for, then the least you can do is give him a reacharound means of financing his exorbitant purchase. The credit check is done while you wait, so you can get reamed and not feel it for 30 days. Then you notice the APR is 20%.

They're gonna like the way you look. I guarantee it.

2:15am:

A new essay up on Disenchanted, this time by guest writer Erik Benson, called There ain't nothin' on TV.

Erik was inspired by an earlier essay at Disenchanted called Early prototype, expect instability, and his essay considers the possibility that there's no such thing as subjectivity. Every opinion we have could've been calculated objectively, with two major factors that make them turn out differently for everyone: the fist is your physical perspective (what information you've access to), and the second is the sum of old decisions that we're too lazy to reconsider.

I like Erik's premise because it challenges the idea of free will (not that I don't think free will is a cool thing to have). If there isn't any such thing as subjectivity, then there's no ghost in the machine either, and a mind could be simulated by a machine. That stuff positively fascinates me.

1:34am: Trust, but verify

A new essay went up yesterday called Scare tactics. It talks about the recent war, and although I toyed with the idea of putting my judgement of the war into the essay, I decided that would contaminate the main idea so I ultimately left it out.

This has been the first war I've lived through where I've been trying to understand it both before it happened, as it happened, and now in the aftermath, and at the same time had a guide to help me understand the war day-to-day by describing the nature of the conflict and putting it into context.

Before I name that guide and give the game away, let me first say that he's a friend of mine, and that the acquaintance goes back long before September 11, or even the day he first started writing his blog or expressing opinions about war, politics, cheese-dip or women. We go way back together. I want to make a point about that in just a sec, but first let me get the gnashing and the wailing of teeth out of the way:

His name is Steven Den Beste. He was in favor of using war to remove Saddam and create an American presense in the Middle East, he thinks President Bush's foreign policy is on the right track, and he's extremely at odds with postmodernism. He's either right-wing or in the center depending on where the center is for you.

There was once a time when Steve's arguments were an anathema to me and I would rail against it, but these days there's very little he writes that I find a flaw with. Part of that is because when I gave up the OS/2 dogma I also lost the reason to Officially Not Like Steve's Opinion, but the other reason is that he reached out and made a friend of me. I've been very receptive of his arguments ever since.

And Steven covers ground I haven't, so when he speaks out on issues of politics and the use of force, it doesn't conflict with anything I've already thought or written about because there's nothing there for it to conflict with.

So what would have happened if a left-leaning writer had made friends with me first, and it was his web site I read all the time instead of Steve's? I approve of Bush's foreign policy because Steven has patiently explained the rationale for it in terms that I understand. So I can approve of it because I understand it. But if that's the truth, then shouldn't I change my opinion if someone explains the antithesis of Bush's policy with as much patience and thourougness?

I don't think you can divine your opinion about something as significant as a war. You can't find it by sitting comfortably and waiting for it to arrive. I think we get it from our peers and role models. Harking back to an earlier essay, we can then use our intelligence to defend a position we arrived at by nonsmart means, making it difficult to switch sides.

So a short version of the above: 1 You get a buddy. 2 Buddy is pro-war. 3 You're pro-war because you listen to him because he's your buddy.

The above is incompatible with any philosophy of absolute correctness, or absolute open-mindedness. It's not objective, it's subjective and open to chance. What to do?

My solution is to run it through Deep Thought II: I'm going to side with Steven now because I don't yet know better. Steven thinks that by demonstrating the willingness to use our power, we will force the Arabs to respect us, and to refrain from hurling passenger jets into our skyscrapers. Steven thinks there are still a couple more punches left in the decaying terrorist culture, but the means and the will to carry them out has been vastly reduced as a direct result of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Steven thinks that if we stick to this track, then in a decade from now Arab terrorism will be a distant memory.

This is a testable hypothesis.

If Steven is right then we shall see. Janeane Garofalo predicted the war would be a disaster, and endorsed estimates that "up to 1 million people will be killed and/or wounded in this war", but that didn't happen. Other critics have predicted that the war would enrage the Arab street and encite more terrorist attacks, but that hasn't happened. And that means I have to reject the rationale that was behind those predictions.

Steve is batting 100 (well, he's actually made a few lousy predictions about timing, so don't schedule your party by his calculations yet), so I'm fortunate to have such a prescient friend. But on a long enough timespan the chances that he'll screw up approach 1, because nobody is that good, and when that happens I'd expect him to change his mind so I can keep reading his blog without getting pissed off. I shall trust, but verify.

Eventually I'll have absorbed as much as Steve can tell me, and I'll start to form my own opinions about the next president, and the next war, as a unique synthesis of Steven's ideas and others. When that happens I don't expect to be pro-war, anti-war, right wing, left wing, or orange flavor. I expect to be correct.

12:03am: Paying the rent

How can Iraq's citizens flip from praising Saddam one day, and dancing on his face the next? If we're convinced one of these behaviors was a sham, how do we know which is which? I have a feeling that what we saw just before the war was the sham, but what we saw in liberated Baghdad last week was still a few levels removed from the weary Iraqis' true feelings.

It wasn't long ago that I saw a news report of Baghdad citizens arming themselves with handguns for the ostensive goal of shooting the Americans when they came to town and defending the honor and glory of Saddam. I knew immediately that what I was seeing was an example of paying the rent: buying your place on the beneficial side of the Republican Guard's Naughty/Nice list, or coining some rhetorical currency in advance--to use in case the brutes came knocking on their door one night. "Oh please sir, not me, I was on CNN last night burning a dirty yankee flag".

In a decent regime they'd write you a receipt.

However, they've been paying the rent for a good twenty years already, and I think this characteristic sticks around even when it seems the threat (Saddam) is gone. Because while I believe US intentions are good, and the liberty Iraqis now enjoy is close to what we have in the States, that was still two weeks of "Shock and Awe" that was keeping them awake every night, delivering a palpable feeling that a new and even tougher regime is to follow. The Iraqis are now paying their rent to the Americans, even if they're ecstatic that Saddam is gone.

And I think we're going to see that for a little while longer, perhaps as much as a month. If we really do establish a liberal democracy in Iraq and people are allowed to unwind their apprehension, get comfortable with the knowledge that they don't need to kowtow to us, then their true feelings will come out. They should be weary after the bombing, they should be wary after we abandonned them in '91, but if they still love the Americans a month after the war is over then we'll know it's real appreciation, rather than a transfer of instincts.

2:23am: Cosmic conspiracies

I find it convenient that a sufficiently large base of KDE users chose to exist so that someone would write a KDE LiveJournal client and make it easier for me to tell you about the new essay at Disenchanted titled Thinking in reverse.

And now, here is that post again, backwards.

.reverse in Thinking titled Disenchanted at essay new the about you tell to me for easier it make and client LiveJournal KDE a write would someone that so exist to chose users KDE of base large sufficiently a that convenient it find I

1:21pm: Instant playlists

I just thought of a feature I want on my MP3 player. My current player supports random play, but you can override the random selection anytime you want. I've noticed that its random number generator never randomizes the seed itself, so the sequence of "random" songs is always the same for any given starting point. If I pick-out "I Have Seen" by Zero 7, it will always be followed by "Motown Coppers" by Fila Brazillia, and then "Vita Voom" by Oziric Tentacles. If I override the random selection to play something else, and then come back to "Motown Coppers" again, the next song after it's done will be "Vita Voom". The number of "instant playlists" is therefore as long as the number of songs in the general playlist, because it appears to use the index number of the overriding song as the seed for the random number generator.

What I want is a random play that clusters songs based on a common attribute and begins the cluster with whatever song you chose from the overall playlist as your starting point. It should categorize the songs by a variety of vectors such as style and mood, so if I pick a slow song it'll follow with more.

Songs should be members of more than one categorizing attribute. Mellow songs with female vocals, mellow songs with male vocals, mellow songs with orchestra backup, mellow songs with synths, etc. The more attributes defined, the better, because then the jukebox can use a vector space search to find songs that come the closest to the starting point, and theoretically extend the cluster to encompass the entire playlist (putting bouncy, blippy songs at the end of a playlist that begins with smooth and mellow).

12:14am: favicon.ico

I have updated the favicon.ico on Disenchanted to feature Tia Nay instead of the ugly purple "D". The icon is 64x64 and the two browsers I have (Mozilla and Konqueror) shrink it down to 16x16 to pack next to the URL or on a bookmark menu. I think that if you use Internet Explorer in Windows to create a shortcut on the desktop then the icon will show up as either 32x32 or 64x64, depending on your screen resolution. I'd like to know what other browsers utilize any version larger than 16x16, too.

12:47am: Feelings of fault and hurt

Today was unhappy.

Today I tried to renew my driver's license, having left it expired for almost two years. There's a faint promise that I could be earning enough to own a car, soon and I wanted to get ready for it. But now I've found that my license had been suspended because of a speeding ticket I didn't pay from four or five years ago. The traffic court's judgement must have been mailed to my old old old old address, even though I wrote my new address on the back of the ticket in the space provided. Now I need to get in touch with a court 300 miles away and find out how much I have to pay.

Today I also had to cancel a credit protection service on my Fleet credit card. The service was activated because they had a telemarketer interrupt me at work, and use a very well-written script that begins with the assumption that you want the service--so the call is presented as a confirmation of an assumed sale rather than an offer. They got me during the day when I was tired and busy and not ready to think about what the telemarketer was actually saying.

But they also use very sharp and aggressive customer retention scripts. They're phrased to tell you off for cancelling the service, and where the initial sales call script is written to assume you already want the service, the customer retention script is written to assume you're waiving a right. The lady will interrupt you, keep talking to maintain a barrage of reasons not to quit, and argue with you when you insist you understand what you're cancelling. Then when that doesn't work, the script ends with "I'm cancelling your protection in case of unemployment, disability or death" and the lady's tone of voice sounds like she's pissed off.

Even though I understand that bureacratic mistakes happen, and understand that a telemarketer script isn't personal and I have no obligation to pay for a service I don't want, I'm still a human being with irrational emotions, and my experiences today have made me feel guilty and ashamed. I feel like I'm in the wrong, and that fuck-ups are my fault.

Tonight I heard on the news that Iraq is executing American prisoners of war, and I felt hurt.

12:24am: At odds with the Singularity

A new essay was published last night called Invent this and die, which is supposed to complement my last one: * Early prototype.... Here I speculate on what might happen if everybody could shoot a perfect game of hoops.

One of the best, and longest responses I've had in a while comes from Les Orchard, who was stimulated into thinking about the daunting prospects of The Singularity if humans are still so incomplete. I have only peripheral knowledge of the Singularity movement's philosophy and position, but I do know that it's transhumanist.

The Singularity itself is a moment in the future when we become infinitely intelligent, and is about one core concept: should we discover a way to reliably increase our own intelligence, then we'll apply those gains to find an even better method. And then like the way a successful business rolls its profits back into the business to make it grow, the Singularity is a self-reinforcing phenomena that may have no limits. A Singulatarian would describe it by drawing a curve of exponential growth on a graph and labelling the Y-axis "IQ". The Signularity is the day we or our machines become omnipotent, and it would feel like waking up.

It's two celebrities are Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge, and its cheerleader appears to be Eliezer Yudkowsky. Vinge is a professor and good Science Fiction writer. I've read three of his books: A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky, and True Names, and I recommend them all. Kurzweil is an inventor specializing in Artificial Intelligence. I can't judge Eleizer yet, except to say that he's more long-winded than Stephen Wolfram.

However, whenever I dip into writings and web sites about the Singularity, it rings the same bells with me that cults do. The Singularity itself sounds like a technologist's answer to the Rapture. Les was thinking that if the Singularity comes and we haven't figured out how to control our intelligence or instincts yet, then we could have a catastrophe. I think a minor disaster could come long before then simply because it's got all the right ingredients for a transhumanist religion. If Vinge, Kurzweil, and Yudkowsky are level-headed, then I hope they're diverting a bit of their attention away from runaway intelligences of the future to think about runaway philosophies in their own time.