Month: May 2007

I am going to make a substantiative post, rather than one of my usual pressure valve items (well, usual in recent memory).

I was reading this awesome article on /. about using CAPTCHA boxes to deal with OCR issues that have come up in the Internet Archive Project. For anyone not in the know, CAPTCHA boxes are those little things that make you type in letters or numbers in an image to make sure you are a human, and not a web spider.

I’ve got a different idea.

When google released zeitgeist, I became very interested in patterns in search activity. I even wrote a couple of nifty analysis algorithms for a data cube drill-down I’ve used on other data sets. Part of what I wanted to do was see if there was some way to harness the energy of what everyone was typing for a creative purpose.

I think that the opportunity to create a story – sort of like twitter, but with a different flavor, is being missed here. Create an open API that is pulling data in from google and several other aggregate sources (news headlines, what happened today in history, etc.) and use that to feed the CAPTCHA systems. People can either write the word in the image, or, they can write a sentence using the word. If they use the sentence, it gets re-amalgamated into a big story-soup for CC-licensed works to be built.

Another thought just occurred to me – make it a game. Mad Libs anyone?

i have been waiting for months for age of conan to finally go open beta. i’ve been waiting for that game forever.

now, blizzard drops starcraft 2 on us?

kill me.

had an awesome weekend. need to get my notes compiled from the last year of gaming so i can start working on some short stories.

This week has been a long one.

I’ve spent the last two days in 10-hour “exploration sessions” with software vendors/sales rep/business analysts. This means that I have had to be at work by 8am, and often was not leaving until 6ish, at which point we would go and get dinner/drinks and schmooze, which means I was not getting home until midnightish…

While it has been a wonderful ego trip to see these people (and my superiors) so confident about the leadership role I am taking in the process, it is more than a little intimidating to be facing down an 18 month deadline, and myself as the main internal resource to make that happen.

I also had to deal with the uncomfortably hilarious circumstance of my boss getting COMPLETELY LOADED last night, and dozing off at the table. We went to a steak house in the E. 40’s and he had a scotch, and three glasses of wine, and a cognac. He then started going crosseyed and head nodding, bloodshot eyes, the whole nine. It took him three calls to get his car to come pick him up. What a mess.

Anyshit, if I missed anything since, say Wednesday, please let me know, cuz I sure as shit haven’t seen it, and I sure as hell don’t have the time to go pickin.

I have forced social interaction night tomorrow at a co-workers house. I plan on getting wasted and leaving early. I have to do some sort of performance art, so I will also be reading a poem. Please shoot me.

Anyone have anything crazy shakin Sunday midmorn-afternoon?

Slainte!

Big ups to for pointing out that my stupid work client had a bunch of stuff pre-selected preventing comments, or e-mail of comments.

so i’ve done more than a little reading on the nature and function of sleep. last night was a doozie in terms of a firsthand experience on one of those theories.

saturday was a load of fun. tons of drinks, good friends, antics, and pay-per-view boxing. if Mayweather actually does retire, and not offer a rematch, i will be shocked to all hell. i wish Chavez had put his face through the canvas. for the record, is a real champ at showing up considerably more sober than the rest of a party, and managing to deal with the drunkenness with finesse. i didn’t get home until a couple hours to sunrise, and didn’t sleep much past sunrise. for the record, crif dogs are waaaay better in situ than delivered.

so remember how i mentioned ffxii? i finally got around the mechanics hitch i was having. i think i played like 12 hours yesterday. when i went to bed (at freakin quarter to three) i definitely knew that this game had grabbed me. however, as tired as i was, i could _not_ get to sleep. i kept thinking about all these things i had undone in life, and, gradually, came to realize the pattern they were coming at me from.

basically, i was weighing all the tangential thoughts i had over the course of the endless conversations between 1pm and 2am sat-sunday morning. this was mixed with some pretty heavy imagery, overlayered by final fantasy soundtracks. i was definitely not asleep – in fact, for one section of this, i actually lay awake watching my clock change from one minute to the next. this is the first time i have experienced lucid fragmentation. it is the act of knowing you are asleep, yet maintaining consciousness on some level _external_ to your dreams/sleep process.

it is something i have been trying to do, on and off, for almost six years. i have no idea why the video game combined with sleep dep kicked it off. it was an amazing feeling, being aware of inner space, as i had these flashes of color, smell, sound and image interlink and fade. i had almost total recall of where each series of images were originating in my conscious memory, and i could feel my head lightening the longer things went on.

tonight, i am joining and , as well as and maybe in what will likely be a networking extravaganza. that, or it will be an open bar evening. either way, i am a douche bag, because i left my business cards, my dry cleaning/laundry receipt, and a very important phone number all sitting next to my keyboard this morning as i scrambled out the door. go me.

hope y’all had a good weekend.

i’m tired.

i had a migraine most of last weekend into the beginning of this week. that left me sleepless. combine general run-down with getting soaked to the bone tuesday night, and i got sick. i’ve been snotty all week, drinking like a gallon of oj a day, emergen-c, and double-doses of nyquil to get thorough the night.

today is the first day in almost a week i feel human (albeit, still stuffy). i went from having a relaxed schedule this weekend to having not one but three saturday obligations, with possible spillover into sunday. i think it is crazy the number of people i know who were born on may 5th!

i finally broke down this week and got ffxii. it is the only one of the series i haven’t beaten, and i felt i should do that before the next one comes out. while i can’t say i am thrilled with it thus far in terms of game mechanics, i am impressed by the immersive nature of the narrative, and the transition between cinematic to gameplay. the ff tactics games made me want to spit blood, and it seems they borrowed heavily from the one i liked least.

tonight, i plan on lying low. everyone and their mother is off to see spiderman 3, which, honestly, (to steal a line from stephen king) i wouldn’t take a flying fuck at a rolling donought for. i’m not so much a marvel fanboy so much as i am a story purist. the way hollywood script writers turn all these really good plots into fucking telemundo novellas in order to pump out sequels really irks me. remember the last sequel movie with three villians in it? remember uma and arnie and fucking bane thrown in for good measure? more badguys != better story.

sure, it is nice for geek movies to be getting some clout, but recent endeavors aside from sin city and the 300, i have been sorely disappointed. the first spiderman was good, i can honestly say i liked it, despite the fiddling. the first batman was good, the second batman was even better. i liked the first x-men. the second was a stretch. the third made me wish my mutant power was self-hypnosis or selective amnesia. the pop craze has all been total slip and slide bullshit across the board. hulk? anyone? fantastic 4? help! why not go back to the old captain america movie for fuck’s sake?

thats my friday grumble. maybe if i can get enough of my shit together today, i’ll throw up a queez later. if not, i hope everyone has a good weekend.

So the whole AACS thing is taking the geek world by storm. It is not too dissimilar to the outrage caused by DVDJohn’s DeCSS ordeal. Amusingly, Wired is the first place I read about this months ago.

Laws that prevent people from having information are dangerous to all of us, and always proffered as laws keeping us safer. Laws governing viability and reproduction of information are more dangerous, in my opinion, than the laws that keep automatic weapons out of the hands of people who are criminally insane. The damage that bullets can do are limited to the range of the weapon they are fired from, and the aim of the individual shooting them. Legislation which restricts information not only has forward facing effects in terms of real data loss, it also stifles the forward motion of thought and progress on the back end. Sure, the flip side argument is made that the proper information, used nefariously, can undue thousands of hours of progress in a very short-sighted manner, or undermine entire safety systems. Personally, I’d rather the risk of having all the info I want than to be kept “safe” by the law.

I don’t think that the ACCS data is of an earth-shaking magnitude of importance. What if, instead of a set of digits used to de-encode HDD-DVD protection, the AACS code was the key to a complex bio-encrypted molecular sequence? What if, when decoded, that sequence allowed you to synthesize a substance that could cure cancer, or the common cold, or halitosis (remember chemistry sets, in the days before 9/11)? Would the outrage be more viable then? Would the law be more silly? Empirically, no, if you believe the lobbyists who move the lawmakers. Contextually, you have to be out of your mind to argue.

Michael S. Malone makes some pretty good points in his ABC article about “not all information being equal”. I’d rather everyone on the internet know where I live and have my social security number than have only a certain group of people with the right tools/power/security clearance/money to bribe have access to the information. I’ve long spoken of my crazy idea for total informational transparency (in person, the one time I tried to write about it, it ended up over 10k words, and i was only half-done). Well, this issue hits right on the head of it.

The fracas over the whole legal issue has created some highly innovative ways for people to publish or encode the information publicly. Some have been defiant about it. Some have been artistic. Many have been outright ingenious.

What helps here is that there is no strict governing body throwing everyone cross linking this data in the gulag. Threats of lawsuits and take downs are not dire repercussions to reposting the information. However, that is largely due to speed of information sharing, and the size of the collective network the information is shared across.

I was recently reading about The Rosslyn Motet and was highly skeptical until I watched this youtube video. It sort of forced these two issues to gel together for me. Why would you possibly go through as much trouble as Mitchell thinks someone went through to hide music? How did they know how to encode sound into shapes 600 years ago? Why would someone go through as much trouble as some companies have gone through to lock music up? In a world where you can get real-time on-demand streaming video, why are we doing everything we can to obscure who gets to watch it? How much information gets lost in the shuffle of time over movements like this, where a central governing body decides what is good/safe/right for people to be doing _across_the_board_?

Read about the Archimedes Palimpsest, and tell me that external bodies governing the worth of information, and, therefore, its viability are a good thing for forward momentum. I’ve been following that story for years, and the recent discovery of new information only further cements my position.

I can only hope that if we, as a species, make it through another couple millennium, that people won’t be looking back at a scraping of something someone wrote today (on, say, evolution, cloning, or stem cell therapy) saying “Oh, gee… look how close they were to a global breakthrough that would have changed the world, if only these fuckheaded book-burners hadn’t gotten in the way.”

This is not a new problem to human thought. This is a problem that goes back to the codification of thought and memory in artifacts outside the mind and the spoken word. As soon as you commit it to writing, someone can burn it or deface it. The Chinese did it, the Babylonians did it,the Egyptians and the Romans did it, Crusaders did it, the Huns did it, the Inquisition did it, the Nazis did it, the Klan did it, hell, even modern groups do it (though generally not on television anymore).

This is a new problem culturally because here, in this country, there is a legal system that allegedly supports freedom of speech that is upholding corporate interests in direct defiance of those freedoms. This is not someone yelling “FIRE!” in a crowded library.

This is a series of numbers, or a treatise on floating bodies, or a book of Egyptian medicine, or a prayer lost to the atmosphere in smoking particles because it was to the wrong god. It is my freedom to speak, or, in this case, write.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0