The New York Times paywall is so leaky that cracking it is easier than subscribing to it. To crack a URL like /31taliban.html?hp&gw[etc] I just need to remove the question mark and everything after it. In my web browser. I literally select some text with my mouse and hit delete. I have no idea how long subscribing takes, but it seems complicated. Either the NYTimes thinks I’m really dumb or they think I’m really smart and are letting me in on the sly. Either way, I don’t get how this makes sense.

I spend an inordinate amount of time logging into things. I spend extra time forgetting passwords and then logging into various email accounts to recover passwords. It’s so obviously stupid that it will obviously be evolved out of in a generation. But how? What replaces the login? What I’m thinking is smell. I think the computer should smell me, know who I am and let me do my stuff. That is, rather than fingerprinting or whatever, to use a wireless seemingly invisible odortype. I think that’s what the cat does and he’s not insanely smart. Should be possible.

China, India and Sri Lanka have opposed military intervention in Libya. That is, the two presumed future leaders of the world and, uh, where I live. As India’s Leader of the House said “No external powers should interfere in it… What is happening in Libya is an internal affair of that country. Nobody, no two or three countries can take a decision to change a particular regime in a third country.” The reasoning these countries use is that sovereignty is sacred. That the nation is the state and that its rights trump human rights. I don’t think that this is true.

The government can do whatever it wants during cricket matches and no one will notice. For example, they recently took over HNB Bank and appointed someone from the Central Bank as the director. The Central Bank regulates this bank, which it now has a financial interest in. Which is a bit off. They also had information no one else has going into the deal, which is a bit like insider trading. Oh, and they did it with pension and public funds, which is my money. But nobody noticed. Because the cricket was on.

Teaching social media is a bit like teaching people to be social. Most people just learn when they’re young. Greg Berger had sessions on YouTube and stuff but for me they were not especially useful. For most activists this is stuff they pick up on the street, as it were, or type in to Google as needed. For some people I think those sessions were new, which was good. I’ve found that this type of information can seem obvious but have a major effect on people who are just discovering it. By the end of the session everyone could pretty much make a YouTube mash-up, which was cool. Zenga Zenga.

I recently met some people involved in the Egyptian Revolution and other movements around the world. The most vital lesson was hope and non-violence. With hope all things are possible and with non-violence it’s possible to communicate hope. One broad trend I saw was that Arab-style revolution seems to be almost a force of nature. Once the conditions are there, the smallest spark can set it off. Activist Ahmed Salah described organizing small groups of people to gather strength in the neighborhoods of Cairo. Normal people seeing other people in the street was the catalyst, not Facebook or Twitter. That spark was the product of years of street-level organizing, though it emerged to the media overnight.

The Afghani fellow asks, quite poignantly, if the speakers had a master key he could take home to help his country. I try to pay attention. He doesn’t talk much and obviously feels a deep human suffering, the normal suffering of a human compounded by the additional suffering of a nation which is more than a bit messed up. The Palestinian girl says she’s looking for something practical to take home after years of trying. An Egyptian tries to say that asking to resolve these questions in a four day workshop is not fair, and then emotion breaks out, across the room. For most, this is just felt as awkward.

The housekeeper’s father sold her for a bottle of booze when she was eight. Many lower income men are the same. They don’t work and what money they do get is spent on booze. I know countless families where women are the main breadwinner, whether they’re working here or forming the majority of workers abroad. What’s surprising, however, is that many upper income men are the same. Not on the same scale of cruelty, but they also don’ work.

I had a long day at work (new job) and this server demo was messing up at home. So I was a bit stressed. The girl offered to make me a cup of tea. It’s funny how Sri Lankans will offer to make tea as an almost symbolic gift for almost any occasion. If you say you have cancer they’ll offer to make some tea. It’s not that tea cures cancer, but it somehow makes you feel better. It’s a symbolic gift of tea. Sri Lanka has sent tea to Japan (thru Sarvodaya I heard). Prior to that we sent some to New Zealand as well.

Intelligent feed readers don’t really exist. I’m terrified to open my Google Reader account, there are a gabillion unread messages and it just stresses me out. An intelligent feed reader would be one that filters out what you should read from what you could read. I’ve been looking, and Shaun Inman’s Fever is all I can find. This feed reader tells you what’s ‘hot’, and it gets better as you add more sources. Unfortunately, it seems to have serious limitations.