I've instituted the use of Adium in my group here to allow us to see when we're at our desks and otherwise available (I became addicted to Communicator, the M$ product while at Microsoft). Very useful to merge all the IM accounts into one tool.
All of a sudden this afternoon I got an IM from someone I didn't know (luv2fukyu2000). They asked "are you there?". So, whimsically, I said "No" and closed the connection.
Up it popped again, asking a/s/l (age, sex, location)? So, rapidly tiring of this game, I answered (12/m/USA). To which the rapid response was "So long."
Pretty darn funny really. Now p0rn is becoming much more aggressive, even coming into a work environment when you don't solicit it.
I wonder if the "providers" (or is that pimps) are hiring college students to do the work? Probably if they are based in the US. It beggars the imagination to think of some pimply-faced geek typing porn 100/words a minute to unsuspecting consumers.
I guess I'm a West coaster these days. Much as I like Baltimore so far a few things rub me the wrong way. Mostly food-related I think. I cannot buy beer or wine in Safeway-equivalents or on Sunday. And today I went looking (telephonically) for foie gras.
A totally fruitless pursuit. I called three of Baltimore's best-known gourmet food stores and at two of them I got "what is foie gras?". The third knew but said that they had discontinued carrying it for "lack of interest".
Damn good thing I can mail order it. It's not like I eat a lot.. maybe two or three tins a year. But it's the little luxuries that make a difference, you know?
I'm watching the 3rd Bond film right now, Goldfinger (after Dr. No and From Russia with Love). Nice way to spend a Sunday evening, have just gotten my old-style bigscreen TV running. I'm still unpacking and had to have help to lift it into the framework I built for it. Must way a good 250lbs. Two of us were pretty strong and it was not at all easy to move.
Love the Shirley Bassey soundtrack. AMC is showing it relatively uncut as far as I can tell (why I watch I don't know as I own the DVD - how stupid is that?). I only saw the first scene for the first time last year when I bought the DVD. The networks used to cut the films unmercifully when they first "premiered" them on TV. Typically, each movie had a long pre-title scene. In Goldfinger, it's a good five minutes long and introduces us to all kinds of Bond characteristics that would become iconic in the series.
His spy skills first, then his suave entry into the cafe, then his intelligence in avoiding being brained by the thug, then his ruthlessness in killing the thug. All in one minute, great sequence.
Sean was definitely at the height of his powers in this film. Every other Bond really does pale before these original portrayals. Even Pierce Brosnan doesn't have the magnetic presence on the screen that Connery did.
First-rate way to spend a Sunday evening.
Whew..
I don't have satellite at my new place here in Baltimore (trees in the way, first time in something like ten years I didn't check before moving into a place) and so had to try and listen to the Liverpool-Everton derby on the Internet.
Unfortunately, for some reason the Beeb (BBC) has decided not to make the streaming broadcasts available outside the UK. So my task was to figure out how to get the broadcast in spite of this.
Obviously, a proxy server to shield my IP was the best way because the Beeb had to be using a DNS lookup on my IP to figure out where I was. This sort of bogosity will go away in a few years as the Internet becomes more ubiquitious and fault-tolerant, but right now it's still possible.
So I went looking and found the very useful site Stay Invisible. It provides both lists of proxy servers worldwide and information on how to browse anonymously. I don't think they necessarily envisioned bypassing the geographical restriction of streaming broadcasts but it works quite well for that.
The first challenge was to find an anonymous proxy server located in the UK. Not all seemed to work, and some of those listed as being in the UK had WHOIS addresses elsewhere (like Germany).
For those of you who don't know what a proxy server is, it was originally designed for use in large networks. It sits between those in the network and the cloud that we call the Internet and intercepts requests for Web pages. If some user in the network has recently accessed a page - say the CNN home page - it compares the contents of the current CNN home page with the one cached in its memory. If they don't differ, it serves up the one in its memory (images and all) and so you (in the network) receive the page much more quickly than you would if it had to travel over a number of hops in the Internet.
This is basically what the "accelerated" service that AOL offers users is. Of limited utility but if your browsing habits are fairly pedestrian it works decently well.
Of course, as the Internet (and traffic) has grown people are using proxy servers for all kinds of things, such as providing images for large sites and now, streaming audio and video content.
In the end, I had to try something like six different servers, turn off Java in my browser (one can determine the real IP of a machine using a Java applet), and remove my BBC cookie to get the streaming broadcast of the match.
But I did it.. and I got to hear Liverpool humiliate Everton 3-1. The scoreline really doesn't tell the story of the match as Liverpool had to defend most of the first half with only ten men, our captain Steve Gerrard having been sent off for two yellow-card offenses.
A wild derby by all accounts. I just wished I could have watched it rather than listened to it.
I just have to fork over a good $100/month to Comcast for the monthly service and I'm loathe to do that. For what, maybe 8-9 games a month?
I think I'll listen on the Internet.
Hmmm.. seems like I've been fiddling while Iraq burns. I've been completely out of the news cycle since last Wednesday and now I see on the International Herald Tribune that Iraq seems to be spiraling out of control pretty quickly. It's starting to look like the Lebanon rather than Vietnam. Aspects of both I suppose but the civil war in the Lebanon, being factional and religious, is probably a much closer parallel at the moment. That, and the civ on civ violence that characterized it.
Maybe this will finally motivate the US government to pull out. I'm sure mothers and fathers across America certainly hope so.
I'm so out of it.. I've just discovered Red vs. Blue, the brilliant little machinima film production that has changed the world of independent film production.
Very cool stuff.
I'm in Geek Central. Love it. I snuck away from the keynote today (Craig Newmark of Craigslist - more humour than content) to make a couple of phone calls from a quite panel session room and I found a couple of geeks had hijacked the unused projector to hook up their laptop and show a bunch of Atom films.
Very cool. It's like being back in college.
I had lunch with a bunch of SXSW people yesterday and one chap actually proposed to limit innovation/creativity. I suggested that we really needed to create middleware layers that made "mashups" easier for the average person to create. He responded that he didn't want think that was a good idea because then we would be drowned in ideas and how would we tell what was "good". To which I responded, so you want to reduce our options? I think the market will decide what is good or not. Look at Flickr! 1.5 million photos and a lot of dreck.. but quite a few really world-class pictures from people no one has heard of.
That's what I want to see.. make art and new ideas easy to synthesize/create and enjoy the results.
One panelist used the term "in the sky" today to discuss objects distributed out on the Web/Internet. I thought about that and Katrina and disasters such as being mugged and losing your digital devices.
And then I thought.. what about sending out images/information on the Web and binding associated meta-data with it. So data could float "in the sky" and have an existence that wasn't bound to a device. Conciously not bound. So one could disassociate devices that displayed data with the actual data.
Of course, we would need a meta-language of tags to describe the information so that it would be retrieved. And we would need a tool to find those tags, and sort them and display the information associated with them.
But still.. it would be very cool to no longer about data storage and retrieval.
Well, my second year at SXSW and I've noticed a few changes (and discussed them with some folks here):
1) It seems more corporate. More big corporations showing up, more people (1200 this year) being pretty serious. Serious equates to less willing to meet other people it seems.
2) More laptops - believe it or not, more people seem to be laptop-equipped. For the first time I've seen serious saturation of the wi-fi networks in the conference rooms - where they slow to a crawl.
3) Still a fairly high calibre of people and the usual coterie of people who want to plug a particular point of view in the guise of a question in the Q&A sections that end the panels.
4) The weather is glorious. Warm, a little humid. It makes for really lovely evenings.
Looks like it should be in the mid-80s during the days in Austin. I'm really looking forward to the tropical weather..
I'm about ready for SXSW again. Next Thursday I fly out to see family and friends in the Austin area, eat good barbecue, drink way too much red wine, and agitate my brain seriously.
Last year I came away with a couple of great startup ideas - which would have been owned by Microsoft if I had written them down anywhere. This year, they're all mine! I think at least one is still valid, unfortunately I've lost a year of development time. I should probably just share it and watch someone else make a million or two off it.
I hope to do a little sightseeing in the Austin area, and eat a better calibre of food, as I have a dear friend who is going to show me around. Last year was a lot of exploration on my own (my cousins have jobs) and it was pretty hit or miss.
I'm making a trip to a famous Polish deli today so that I'll have some kielbasa to deliver as a visit gift.