I must apologize for my dereliction of blogger duties. I’m writing an article for the Leader on the WikiLeaks thing. To get the human story behind it all, I do recommend a few reading items. First is Raffi Khatchadourian deeply reported profile of Julian Assange in the New Yorker. Very interesting tidbits there, including how WikiLeaks came across their first tranche of documents. It was from the Chinese, who were using a common underground server. The second piece is a transcript of a recent interview with Time magazine. In it Assange speaks about his philosophy regarding the political impact of these leaks. One money quote, among many:

The new Daily Mirror site is great, I like it a bit better than the old. I just get the strangest error when I visit it on my phone. It says “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” I don’t know if it’s a tribute to Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 or what but it’s weird. But then it lets me view the site anyways. I thought my phone had been hacked for a while. The Daily Mirror is still innovating (in Sri Lankan terms) online, so good luck to them.

I finally caved and got a Mac. I love my little netbook but I can barely edit photos and can’t edit video at all. Hence. It’s a bit of a risk, but I got a 24 inch floor model with 2G extra RAM for Rs. 80,000 from EPSI (Majestic City). They say they have a year old MacBook Pro laptop for Rs. 120,000 if anybody wants. These aren’t list prices or anything, I just went in an negotiated. They gave me a free book on income tax that I saw lying around. The risk is no warranty, so if the thing bricks I’ll be hari dukkai. However, I can’t afford a full ticket new one and this model is quite frankly ill as fuck. I have icons bigger than my netbook screen. More to the point, I can edit RAW photo files and HD video without intermittent tea breaks. I think there’s something stuck under the space bar. Besides that everything is OK.

I like music, but getting it stresses me out. There are good pay services like Rhapsody with almost infinite catalogs, but they’re terrorists and don’t work in Sri Lanka. iTunes, also, doesn’t officially work in Sri Lanka and is way overpriced. That leaves internet radio and piracy. Pandora is supposed to be good Internet radio, but block Sri Lankans. Instead, I use last.fm and Hype Machine for internet radio. I’ve also started using SoulSeek for downloading individual tracks. None of these solutions are ideal, but I’ve listed some options below.

Being a geek, one of my heroes is Alan Turing. He said the basic test of intelligence is whether you can have a conversation. This Turing Test has become the gold standard of artificial intelligence. He laid the philosophical foundations of modern computing in the 30s. To quote Time “The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine.” He also cracked the Nazi Engima code, basically saving our collective asses. However, in 1952 he was prosecuted for being gay, chemically castrated and killed himself two years later.

I love my phone and I love my netbook. I remember a time when I didn’t have them and it sucked. I also remember walking around Montreal with my primitive Ericcson flip and thinking all the things a phone could do. Now most of those things can be done. However, today’s super jack-knife phones still neglect some basic, simple features which I think would be mara useful. Specifically, forwarding contacts, managing contacts and not dying on me. All of these things are technically possible now, but haven’t quite happened.

Oh man, this is dumber than I ever thought. I was reading Maddox after he points out that the user license for fucking iTunes says “You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.” Actually, I got that from the EULA for the iTunes store. Which is much the same. I’m just sitting here trying to figure out how I can manufacture ‘nuclear’ or chemical weapons with my damn iTunes. Is that feature hidden in there somewhere? Is global thermonuclear war an Easter Egg? The day that terrorists make a nuclear bomb out of iTunes is the day that I join the terrorists.

I got one of the first smartphones when it came out. These are my blogs from that period: Phlog, Xanga, 20six. The P900 was one of the first camera/internet phones and I had a lot of fun with it. I haven’t had a real phone since. Last week I finally got fed up. Mili and I went down the street and got these Rs 35,000 Samsung smartphones, by grace of our lord and Mastercard. I don’t have the money, but my life is better. The thing is designed for engineers, but once you hack it into submission it’s all right. It’s more powerful than some PCs I’ve had and the Internet (HSPA) is the same speed as my laptop connection. Plus I can check my email all the time, which gives the semblance of activity, if not productivity.

I’ve been doing some design work and seeing some design work, and the contrast between minimal and overdesign is striking. A lot of Sri Lankan leaflets, banners, etc are a cacophony of elements and fades and fonts ad nauseum. It’s as if someone grabbed Photoshop and shook it violently until it spewed its entire contents on the page. I think part of the problem, the dearth of minimalism, is that software removes the scarcity from design. There are no physical costs to extra layers and effects. The other part of the problem is that graphic design classes teach technique, but they don’t teach understanding. Design isn’t meant to fill space, it’s meant to communicate, and that’s hard to teach.

For all the fuss and poetry and conversation, the few things that people across cultures can understand is sex and violence. We can fuck and we can kill each other. If you’re looking for a rule-set that governs humanity, the two biological constants are reproduction and death. If you think about all the social functions that you get off your ass to go two, the two big ones are weddings and funerals. You don’t (at least I don’t) even understand why you’re there, but you go. People spend hideous amounts of money with no measurable return. Why? I’ve been going to a bit of weddings and funerals and I do wonder. What I wonder more than anything is why nobody else seems to wonder. Like, how do people just know that these things are important?