It seems the demise of print newspapers is alarming old loons.  The world is a-changing.

A 23 year old student was telling me today about how shocking it is to consider that her 19 year old sister has never known a world without the internet.  Mind you, I’m pretty sure my student doesn’t really recall the pre-internet times, either.

I then told her that I was born before man walked on the Moon.  This literally horrified her as her jaw fell agape.  Yes, it makes me feel old.  But I’m also rather proud to be of a generation that both pre-dates and created the digital, modern world.  I like to remind people that the Apollo spacecraft had less computing power than most peoples’ wristwatches.  Well, I used to say that, back when people wore wristwatches.  Now, I guess I have to say cell phones.

I also used to say that half the world has yet to make a phone call.  This was, of course, before the mobile phone revolution.  (Mind you, the stat is debatable.)  That’s right, kids: there was a time before you were able to make a phone call or send a message at your convenience.

I was also chatting with a friend’s 16 year old daughter this past week, explaining to her what life was like when I was 16.  It’s both depressing and inspiring to consider the ways in which technology has profoundly changed they ways in which we live, as quickly as a few decades.

When I was 16, it wasn’t unusual to have but one phone in each house.  Usually, that phone was in a central part of the house, so everyone could hear your business.  In most cities, only the caller could end the conversation; if you called someone and didn’t hang up, the other party couldn’t just hang up and end the call.  This was nightmarish for homes with teenagers, since teens thrive on their social contact.  If you have to talk to your friends, or call a girl, you have to wait until the phone was free… and then you had to time it so that the girl’s phone was also free!  Remember: no email, no texting, no cell phones; this was our only option!

In times of extreme need, we’d run across the street to use the pay phone.  But even those were often in use!  Oh… and there used to be pay phones on every corner!

One time, my future girlfriend was waiting for a call from me.  Meanwhile, I was building up the nerve to call her.  Of course, I had to wait for my home phone to be free before I could make the call.  But then, when I finally did, her line was always busy!  Turns out, her Dad was on the phone and she was begging him to get off, without telling him that “a boy might be calling.”  Predictably, he got off the phone for 30 minutes and told her, “Okay, I’m off.  Make your call.”  In retrospect, I sympathize with her frustration as she wanted to scream at him, “It doesn’t work like that!”

If you were really stressed out, you could call the Operator and ask for an “emergency breakthrough”.  She would interrrupt a call in progress and tell the parties that a third party wanted in.  Yes, most of us teens did this at least once.

Oh, and because the house had but a single line, you could never be sure your parents or siblings weren’t eavesdropping on your conversation.  (This became possible when they finally made additional phones available on the same line, sometime in the late 70s, I think.)  You always had to listen for that “click” that meant your parent had put the phone down before you started your private conversation.

Mind you, from a societal perspective, this might not have been a bad thing.  It ensured that a parent was usually aware when their teenager was receiving a call, and usually ensured that parents knew who their kids’ friends were.  These days, they rely on Facebook for that!

Additional phones became widely available (again on the same line, or number) sometime in the 1980s, as I recall.  That’s when they started installing “jacks” so you could plug your phone into the wall.  Before then, we had to wire the phones directly into the wall by screwing the right wires to the right poles.  As a kid, I used to play with the phone wiring a lot, trying to figure out which wires were responsible for what aspects of the signal.  I learned a lot about electronics and telecommunications that way.

The lack of email and cell phones meant that when you made plans to meet your friends, you had to abide by those plans!  There were no last minute changes, or texts/emails with, “I’m running late!”  You had to show up and trust that your plans held up.  This was the source of much confusion, miscommunication and frustration, especially when trying to coordinate group activities.

(Don’t get me started on the revolution of ATM machines!  Prior to their arrival, again sometime in the mid-1980s, you had to rely on whatever cash you happened to have on hand.  This meant planning your weekend expenditures well in advance, since banks were never open on Saturdays.  And, of course, no one had a credit card, and the debit card had yet to be invented!  In retrospect, this was a good system for saving money, or at least for avoiding extraneous expenditures..)

Answering machines became prevalent in the early 80s.  Electronic voicemail about a decade later.  Before this development, you had to wait by the phone if you were expecting important information.    In other words, the phone compelled geographic stagnancy!

Okay, I’m droning on.  Next, I’ll be complaining about them dang kids in my yard with their boogie-woogie music.

History was made today when the Nobel committee announced that Canadian Ralph Steinman will receive the Nobel prize for Medicine…. even though he died on Friday.  The committee did not know that he had died, and of course Dr  Steinman did not know that he was about to win.  The moment is historic because many times in the past, the Nobel committee has refused to offer posthumous awards.  This has simplified their task considerably, and has also made their role even more controversial.

But in this case, no one is going to argue that it was the right thing to do.  If you need a loophole to allow it, then one can consider that the decision to award him was made while Dr Steinman was still alive.  Maybe that should be the new standard.

On another medical note, I want to draw attention to the story of Dr. Rodney Willoughby, Jr, pioneer of what is today called the Milwaukee Protocol, which is the world’s first system for treating rabies without a vaccination.

Dr Rodney Willoughby, Jr

Rabies has been one of mankind’s worst scourges for centuries, if not millennia.  Until the development of the rabies vaccine in 1885 by Louis Pasteur,   to be bitten by a rabid animal was a death sentence.  Pasteur’s formulation, and its successors, have since become, not only a prophylaxis, but also a treatment, which is effective for a brief period after first exposure.

In 2004, a 15 year old American girl names Jeanna Giese went to the hospital complaining of some neurological symptoms, more than a month after having been bitten by a bat.  Jeanna’s condition declined rapidly and her status as rabies positive was confirmed, leading to her physicians to declare that she would be dead in days, if not hours.

She fell into the care of Dr Rodney Willoughby of the Children’s Hospital of Milwaukee.  Frantic for any kind of treatment, Willoughby found what the media typically describes as “an obscure paper on the internet.”  The paper essentially suggested that rabies victims die of brain failure before their natural immune systems have sufficient time to destroy the virus.  So Willoughby made the innovative conceptual leap to try to protect Jeanna’s brain while her body did the hard work.

His solution was to put her into a coma and hope that that would protect her brain.  It was a low probability shot, and Jeanna’s parents are commended for having decided that, even if Jeanna died, what will have been learned from the attempt might enable the new protocol to be refined for the next victim.  Ten days into the coma, Jeanna opened her eyes.  She was cured.

“Cure” is a problematic word.  The virus had “rewired” her brain.  She had to re-learn how to walk and speak.  Even today her speech is slowed, and she has blocks of missing memory.  But she is alive and functioning.  In fact, earlier this year, Jeanna Giese, the first known survivor of a full-out rabies infection graduated from college.

Willoughby’s treatment regimen has since been named the Milwaukee Protocol.  It has been refined since Jeanna’s historic recovery, and has been used to save the lives of five other individuals.  It is important to note that most people, even those indertaking the new protocol, do not survive.

I want to draw attention to an often overlooked aspect of this story.  It is true that after many centuries of effort, only now has someone managed to cheat rabies.  One of the reasons for this is…. information.  Specifically, the internet.  Willoughby had mere hours to figure out a viable regimen.  His ability to access all knowledge on the topic of rabies, at lightning speeds and at the touch of his fingers, allowed him to find the one study that gave him the idea of inducing a coma.

So first, someone had to have had the wherewithal to write down his theories about rabies, brain health and the immune system.  Second, someone else had to have had the good sense to publish those theories.  And lastly, the information revolution called the Internet put that paper at the fingertips of Dr Willoughby, and medical science was revolutionized.

The free flow of information, the sharing of scientific knowledge and opinion, saved Jeanna Giese’s life, and may have finally conquered one of humanity’s oldest foes.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of manned space flight, as noted in the current Google Doodle:

I’ve written enough about my hero, Yuri Gagarin (here, here, here and here), so I won’t bore you anymore.  I will say three things, though:

While Gagarin was undoubtedly the first human being to go into outer space and return safely to Earth, some conspiracy theorists insist that the Soviet Union had launched other cosmonauts into space and had failed to recover them.  This seems unlikely to me.

We celebrate Gagarin today.  But my thoughts are often of the dogs that the USSR had launched prior to any human being.  They died the most horrible deaths imaginable, alone and terrified in Earth orbit.

Today is also the 30th anniversary of the first Space Shuttle launch.  I remember that day quite clearly.  The pilots, as I recall, were John Young (a seasoned moonwalker) and Robert Crippen, the latter on his very first space mission.

But…

Today’s real topic, though, is the future of the world of computers.  Now, I’m not a computer expert.  However, computers –their history, construction and programming– is one of my serious hobbies.  Not surprisingly, my Gwitter project is a marriage of my career (global health) and my love (computing).  You can still vote for Gwitter until April 29, by clicking on the “thumbs up” icon in the lower right of the linked page; so go forth and do so!

Ever heard of Moore’s Law?  First articulated in 1965 by Gordon Moore, it essentially states that the density of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every 1.5 years.  Translated from Nerdese, it says that the raw power of computers would double in that time period, based almost entirely on technological advances in making smaller and smaller components.

Moore’s Law has actually held true for the past 45 years, and is expected to continue to be true for another 10-15 years.  A corollary states that the computing power available to us will always exceed the amount of computation needed to be performed.  At the turn of the century, there was some concern that this corollary would no longer hold, as the Human Genome Project was about to dump ungodly amounts of data onto our laps.

However, to my knowledge, this did not happen.  The rate of computing advancement continued to outstrip society’s demand for raw computational power.  This had the added economic advantage of allowing the computer industry to put out a new generation of machine every 1-2 years.  (Ever wonder why your laptop from 5 years ago doesn’t cut the mustard anymore?  It still works fine.  But since transistor density has outpaced it, software has also grown to match the new computers’ abilities, so your old laptop can’t keep up with the young’uns anymore.)

In my opinion, this has been the major force in maintaining the personal computer industry as a multibillion dollar affair.

Now experts are predicting that Moore’s Law will cease to apply in 1-2 decades, due to absolute physical and quantum limits in how small one can make transistors.  Some manufacturers are already feeling the crunch, hence the proliferation of multiple-core processors –it’s a way of increasing computing power without increasing transistor density.

So, given that transistor technology development will slow in coming years, here are my non-expert predictions (informed in part by a recent article in University of Toronto Magazine) for what this will mean for the computing universe:

1. The new trend will continue: how many cores can one shove into a single computer?

2. The industry focus will shift away from developing more powerful computers to the development of personalized devices (smart phones, book readers, wearable computers, etc) in an attempt to increase market share without dramatically pushing technological advancement.

3. Since the raw guts of the machine will plateau in power, a greater reliance will be placed on software development for the purposes of improving speed and efficiency.  Perhaps this will mean a reduction in software bloat.

4. Cloud computing will continue to expand and evolve.  Since the rate limiting step in this process is network speed, more focus will be placed on vectorizing devices’ access to networks.  (Yes, “vectorize” is a real word; I borrowed it from my old FORTRAN programming days.)

4(a). New modalities for cloud computing will evolve.  A variety of smaller computing “farms” will arise to compete with Google for supremacy in the Cloud market.

5. A crisis in the IT industry will be experienced in 1.5-2 decades, as workers and companies must re-task themselves away from chip development toward application development.

6. A push will be on to develop the first consumer-ready quantum computers.  Such devices would be paradigm-shifting industry arrivals which may do away with the need for transistor density altogether.

And there you have it.  I’d welcome any comments from people who are actually experts in this field.

Ever used “Goggles“, the Google utility that allows your cell phone’s camera to act as a visual search engine? It’s pretty cool. My brother and I were playing with it last night. Our first attempts were to search the image of Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Goggles accurately identified him from a photo we took of his image on a computer screen.

So then we tried an obscure photo of a young William Shatner. Goggles returned with…. wait for it… “young William Shatner.”

So then my brother decided to photograph images of yours truly. We used this image first, then this one.

Well, Goggles identified my first image as….. this:

And my second photo was identified as…. this thing:

So then we tried scanning a pic of friend Andrew Currie; this head shot, to be specific. And this is what Goggles identified his head as:

The technology has some bugs.  Happy Xmas!

The Daily Perv Link (please see disclaimer) is long dead, but sometimes some stories arise which just deserve that oft misunderstood tag.  First up, a Chines man passes out after a night of binge drinking.  Instead of drawing a penis on his forehead, his friends INSERT A LIVE EEL INTO HIS RECTUM!!!  Yes, he died.  Next, while searching scholarly publications for unusual studies that I could include in my 4th year epidemiology exam, I came across this: an adolescent suffers injuries after forcing his bulldog to have anal sex with him.  You know, you just can’t make this shit up.

Day two of Deonandia 3.0 is so far seamless.  But as you can definitely see, there are still no archived comments.  I want to thank the following bloggers for providing valuable support in trying to fix this problem: Justinsomnia and Adventures In Goat World.

Currently, I’ve installed Disqus as a replacement for Js-kit.  Do you hear that, any Js-kit employees that might be reading this?  I’m still a paying subscriber to your services, but you offer almost no workable solutions to any of the problems your migration created!  The good folks at Disqus, in the mean time, are working on a comment import utility and assure me that there is hope.  See, that’s all I asked for: hope.

In return, I’m giving Disqus a chance on this site before reverting to the native WordPress commenting system.

So what’s next? An automated Twitter digest and the eventual migration of my two sister sites to this platform.

Welcome to Deonandia 3.0. Oh, what a nightmare it has been. More than three days of continual work have finally resulted in the salvaging of this veritable old blog from the Google dungheap. Most of you probably don’t realize this, but this blog has been operational continuously for 11 years now, which I think makes it one of the oldest extant blogs on the ‘Net. Before 1999, the mother site Deonandan.com was active since 1993, but without the “daily” updates that the world eventually came to know as a “weblog” or “blog” for short.

From 1999 to 2004, I called these updates my “Bulletin”, and I pasted them in basic HTML, which was both cheap and time consuming. You can still see those old posts if you go to my archives and scroll to the very bottom.  Version 2.0 was launched on January 1st, 2005,  as I finally joined the rush and updated the format to a “traditional” blog.   On December 17th of that same year, this space was formally re-Christened as “Deonandia”.

Now, I was one of those 0.5% of Blogger.com clients who kept his files on his own FTP server.  I did this for security and control reasons, and because I need the blog to be seamlessly integrated with the rest of my content on Deonandan.com and her sister sites.  But, of course, earlier this year Google bought out Blogger and announced that they would be discontinuing FTP support.  So my quest was on to find a new home for Deonandia, one that could easily accept my complicated file structures and over 1000 posts.

Wordpress was the obvious solution, but not the free blogs over at Wordpress.com, but the even freer self-hosted blogs downloadable from Wordpress.org.  After investing a day trying to start my own server, using both WAMP and XAMPP, I concluded that since Vista hates me, I should let the pros handle the hosting bit.  So I turned to my longtime webhost, Bravenet.  I’ve bitched about them a lot in the past,  but this time they came through for me with easy to use SQL and PHP services.

All done, right?  Not quite.  There are hundreds of bugs that still need fixing in this migration from Blogger to Wordpress.  The two big ones are the location of my archived posts, which Blogger stored as HTML files, but which Wordpress stores as SQL data.  This is important because existing links to many posts have been created over the past 11 years, and I don’t want to lose those linkages.  I finally found a solution by creating a series of PHP redirect commands.  This required me to invest a day in learning how to program in very basic PHP!

The other big bug still remains: how to get my user comments from Js-Kit (formerly haloscan) imported here.  You will notice that there are no comments on any of the blog posts.  This is a real bitch.  I should have turfed haloscan years ago, but kept putting it off.  Finally they merged with another company and formed the unwieldy beast called Js-Kit, whose exported comments refuse to place nice with any 3rd part commenting service that I’ve yet found.

This guy was on to something, but his solution didn’t quite work for me.

I do want to thank the following bloggers for having posted very useful tutorials for getting me this far:

The Devil’s Workshop

Ravi Dreams

Webweaver

PHP Editors

I am wayyyy behind in all my work, but at least the blog is somewhat salvaged.  We’ll see if it’s still here in the morning!

You remember this post, right? Here’s an update.

When last we visited our feckless hero, he had somehow managed to move all his data from a Palm platform to the hated MS Outlook, at which point he magically was able to push it all onto his spanking new Windows Mobile device, the Palm Treo Pro…. whereupon he chose to enter the second decade of the 21st century by opting to sync with the Cloud, the Google cloud, to be precise.

Things were going okay for a few days until I made a horrific discovery. (Yes, I’m switching back to first person. Try to keep up.) It seems that everytime I modified a contact under Google contacts, silly Google, rather than deleting the pre-mod version and replacing it with the post-mod version, would either merge the two entries, keep both, or keep both with seemingly randomly merged data.

It gets better. Syncing with the mobile phone has become unpredictable, as memory errors keep accumulating.

Well, I figured, time to move away from Google, right? So I wisely exported all my Contact data into two separate formats –CSV and VCF– just in case. Then, on the advice on a knowledgable friend, I got myself a premium account with memotoo.com and did all the right thingies to move my contacts data from Gmail over to memotoo.

Well what do you think happened? The sync was complete and…. the memotoo version is lacking all the profile photos…. and both versions (Google and memotoo) are missing about 200 contacts. They’ve vanished.

Well, then, time to delete all my Gmail contacts and reload them from my wisely saved backups, right? Um…. it seems that when Google exports an address book –regardless of the format you choose– the profile photos do not export with it. So, I have lost all my profile photos.

Or have I? The data on my actual device remains pristine, right? I mean, minus whatever minor changes I recently made at the server end. All I need to do now is to successfully perform a device sync and all should be fine… until the next crisis.

But of course now the device won’t sync. Why? Who knows. All I know is that, even though Google Still Owns My Ass, I’m no longer impressed by the owner’s ability to maintain said ass.

Sit back, my droogies, and let me tell you a tale of techno-disappointment and e-frustration…

I am, as they say, an “early adopter”, someone who tends to embrace technological innovation slightly earlier than the bulk of humanity. I had an email address in the late 1980s, back when you had to explain to people at parties what that meant and why it was useful. (Sort of like explaining Twitter to non-Tweeters today, and always getting the ignorant, dismissive response, “Why would anyone want to do that?!!”) I got my first PDA, a Palm Pilot, in the late 1990s, and enjoyed its various short term progeny, the Palm III and Palm IIIe for years before moving on to the Handspring Visor, which was the shiny “Mac”-type version of the Palm workhorse.

At parties I would get ooohs and ahhhs because my Visor also came equipped with a module that you could stick into its top, the “Eyemodule“, which –gasp!– allowed you to take a digital photo! Here’s a standard, tiny and blurry black-and-white self-portrait taken on the Eyemodule about 10 years ago:

Most people at this time enjoyed internet access via dial-up service. Kids, that meant that you had to use the phone line to check your email and download your porn, on something as slow as a 56K connection. My PDA was ahead of its time because it had a phone jack that allowed me to plug in to any phone line, dial up my ISP, and download my email… to my handheld device!!!

Around this time, cell phones were coming into common usage. The first generation Watphone was this monstrosity, built by Sony, and provided by ClearNet, the precursor to Telus:

It was heavy enough to use as a weapon, inefficient enough to burn a hole through the fabric of your pocket, and bulky enough to get the ladies’ attention if you kept it in your front pants’ pocket.

Eventually, the Visor also came with a game-chaning new attachment, the Visorphone, which allowed you to dial your phone directly from the PDA! Worlds of wonder, indeed!

Predictably, the PDA world and phone world finally came together. Thus, the “smartphone” was born. (See this 1996 Podium article on the ascension of the smartphone by Andrew Currie.)

Since my data was all in the Palm world, I gravitated to the Treo line of smartphone products, beginning with the flip-top 90, mostly because I could pretend I was using a Star Trek communicator:

The 90 and 180 both had the fun flip top, but were tragically fragile. I documented by early attempts to repair them in this 2005 post.

And so I progressed from the 90 through to the 180, 270, 300, 600, 650 and 680. My first attempts to deviate from the Palm world are documented in my June 2007 post, where I briefly –and foolishly– attempted a brief flirtation with Windows Mobile 5.

Eventually I moved on to the Treo 680. My 680 has kept me in good stead for the past few years:

(Or, as my technophobic massage therapist calls it, my “C3P0″)

So what’s the big deal? Frankly, Palm OS is a sufficiently stable and useful platform. More importantly, it syncs with Palm Desktop, the lightest, most stable and useful PIM (personal information manager) I’ve ever found.

But Palm OS was invented for an unwired world. It really hasn’t changed much in over 10 years, back when it revolutionized the industry on the Palm Pilot. The world abandoned Palm OS some years ago, and no updates have been forthcoming. The OS is crappy for web browsing and for integrating the new generation of “cloud” services; thus its phones often crash when you try to make a phone call while an email message is downloading. It really cannot multitask.

But all the new smartphones have crappy PIMs. Now, I write a monthly blog for MicroSoft, which means I really shouldn’t rag on their products. But you know what? Outlook sucks. It really does. It’s bloated and virus-friendly, often crashes, and tries to take over every function on my computer. Palm Desktop beats it in every category that is important to me. But Outlook is the preferred PIM for pretty much every existing smartphone on the market.

Thus my dilemma: if I wish to evolve beyond the confines of Palm OS, I also need to give up Palm Desktop. My blog post of Jan 2009 detailed this dilemma, and even reported that I found a solution: Airset. Except that Airset isn’t a real solution, just a stop-gap to ensure that some of my data is stored somewhere Cloud-like.

The news: I have purchased a Palm Treo Pro, which runs Windows Mobile 6, but is still friendly to the lineage of Treos that I adore so much. Yes, I would buy a Palm Treo Pre, but they are way too expensive right now. In either case, I still need a solution for converting all my data from Palm Desktop format to something –anything!– else. It seems I cannot avoid using Outlook.

Okay then… where to begin? There is supposedly an easy way to do this. Palm offers a special “conduit” for syncing the old Treo directly with Outlook and thus creating a whole new world of data. The problem is that… it does not work. At least not for me. At least not entirely. Custom fields created in the address book need to be manually mapped, one by one. I have 1500 address book entries, so that’s not gonna fly.

Then there’s the issue of the profile photos I associate with each of my contacts (yes, each of YOU). They also do not transfer over to Outlook, neither 2003 nor 2007.

So, to make a long story short, I spent several days trying solutions. I tried something called Companionlink, which sounds like a Seniors dating service, but is actually a third party syncing solution. Not only did it not work, but my attempts to force it to work eventually caused a core dump on one of my computers, forcing me to shift work over to another computer. (Luckily, my tiny condo is populated by 6 computers, none of which is particularly useful.)

Then I tried PocketMirror, which sounds like something you’d buy at Pervs-R-Us, but which is in fact a third party sync solution specially made for Palm OS devices and Outlook. It works… sorta. But it doesn’t transfer over those all-important profile photos.

Then I tried PocketCopy, which is meant for a one-time transfer of data from Palm Desktop to Outlook. Weirdly, this worked partway… which was a start!

Long story short, after trying a slew of third party solutions –some purchased and some pirated– and after literally rendering one of my computers unusable and crashing two more –and after having to painstakingly convert several items by hand– I now have one computer fully loaded with a version of Outlook that also has a complete mirror of my Palm Desktop data.

And that’s 90% of the problem solved right there.

The remaining 10% has to do with syncing my device to Outlook, which is a special kind of hell. The activesync process doesn’t always work, is heavily bloated and sometimes results in corrupted data (in my experience). So the solution I found was this: sync once to get the data from Outlook to my device, then from then on, sync “over the air” directly with the Google Cloud using Google’s MicroSoft Exchange service.

First attempt: works like a charm. Google owns my ass.

Lingering problems:

• Sometimes it doesn’t work
• It doesn’t sync tasks or notes
• Google calendar doesn’t seem to go back more than a year, whereas my data goes back many years
• If I update a profile photo on Google contacts, that photo does not get transferred to my device during the sync
• Google Calendar has the annoying habit of stretching all the birthdays in my contacts list across 48 hours

All this to say…. Maybe I’ll get a Palm Pre after all.

Greetings from a Starbucks on Chapel St in New Haven, Connecticut. I’m here to attend a conference at Yale University. What a nice place! Weird how I can’t find any free wifi here, though; I’ve been reduced to paying for wifi at a coffee shop. I’m so ashamed.

As a new professor struggling to find his footing at a 2nd tier Canadian university, I must admit to being a bit star-stricken here at this storied and ivy-draped legend of academia. How I wish I’d had the money decades ago to attend a school like this. We really do live in a classist society, wherein the trajectory of one’s life is oft determined by the size of one’s family’s assets.

Thus it’s a bit ironic that I’m here essentially to hear Jeff Sachs speak about the financial and economic basis of world poverty and ill health. Doubly ironic that Sachs’ name is tainted by his associations with corporate greed, classism of the worst variety, and the nightmare of Russian economic “shock therapy”.

My day begain today by oversleeping and arriving at the airport technically after the gates of my flight had closed. I was scolded by the airline dude (“I really shouldn’t check you in but…”) And as I was about to thank him profusely for making an exception for me, I discovered that my flight was running aan hour late. Yeah I was technically late, but I was also technically early. Asshole.

I’m checked into the Duncan Hotel, which is a 120 year old grimy building that’s both dark and moldy, but is also very cheap and smack downtown, a couple of blocks from Yale. The elevator dude warned me: “We shut down the elevator after 11pm, so you’ll have to take te stairs if you come in late.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I need the exercise.”

Then he barked at me: “It ain’t no laughing matter for the disabled people!” Asshole. They should really let him out of the elevator now and then.

I stopped for a giant buffalo meat burrito at a brilliant cafe called the “Corner Copia”. Quite unlike me, I decided to share a table with a stranger. She was an older woman with a floral hat, crumbs about her mouth, and many possessions scattered about her. I have a habit of attracting crazy people, so I was braced for the worst.

But this woman was remarkable. She was a retired anthropologist with an incredible amount of wisdom and experience about a great many topics. She had done cutural fieldwork in Trinidad, some research on the linguistic potential of Neanderthals, had written a Chinese cookbook, and presently starting an ESL business in Asia. Her husband had been a project manager on the Apollo space flights, for Zod’s sake! Given the great number of ambitionless people I’ve been encountering of late, it was a joy to learn of the details of this woman’s life.

In Other News…

More evidence that the world is fundamentally retarded: The Pirate Bay has been found guilty. This bit of prosecutorial nonsense seems to be a case of pure vindictiveness and a rather liberal and reaching interpretation of the law. Copyrights as we know them are passe. We live in an era when we need to redefine the limits of so-called intellectual property, the assumptions underlying which are inherently philosophically problematic.

I particularly like TPB’s so-called “King Kong defence“, with its shades of South Parkianism.

The amazing part is that while the owners of TPB have been found guilty, there appears to be no legal compulsion to shut down the website. What a frakked up situation. So get yer torrentz while u can.