thebox

Owning Your Own Time

If you can't wade throught the entire talk, you can skip to the last 15 minutes or so. Economics Professor Richard Wolff is basically arguing for people's democratic control of their own economic position. This talk drew me in because I agree with his solution (although the analysis was a bit fuzzy). Even more, I've spent the last 2 years working on some real estate ventures and a startup so that I can "own my own time". I think most people hear me say that and don't quite grasp the Marxist underpinnings of that statement. It's basically the argument that workers in an enteprise should be the major owners of that enteprise. This makes workers happier, more productive and the immediate beneficiaries of any gains realised.

This isn't new stuff, but it feels like it's picking up more steam ever since our latest economic crisis. It first clicked for me around 2003, listening to Noam Chomsky. In 1970, he described something very similar in "Government in the Future", an analysis of 4 major political/economic systems in an advanced industrial society. Paul Graham, a kind of start up guru, has been talking much about how individuals working for themselves in startups is the economic future. Here, he is talking about why humans were meant to work in small groups.

Another Small Step for Man

While China has had their first manned space walk (third manned mission), the US just had their first privately organized space flight. Very cool.

Story of the Atom

I love Music, Computers and Theatre. Math, Physics and Linguistics though, have been sort of pet interests of mine over the last few years. So this video series was perfect for me. Professor of Nuclear Physics at the University of Surrey, Dr. Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of the discovery of the atom at the beginning of the 20th century, up to the latest developments in quantum mechanics today.

Part 1 (The Clash of the Titans)

Part 2 (The Key to the Cosmos)

Part 3 (The Illusion of Reality)

Something New

This mix is in loving memory of my brother, Sam.

Something New Ce Jeu St Andrew Remix Yelle; Fuck the Google Beaufort; I Know UR Girlfriend Hates Me Annie; Stay Night And Day Rocca; Science of the Dark Fraser Quartz; The Lake Zeigeist; Fit Right In Debbie Harry; Rhythm Is Gonna Get You Gloria Estefan; Something New (Galactic Version) The Black Ghosts; Disorientation Supplemental Facts; Chime Orbital

(If you're not seeing the mp3 widget, try my garageband page)

Capturing MySpace MP3s

I find it a more than a little annoying that I cannot save MP3s being streamed to my computer through MySpace. They are after all, files on my computer. And if I don't plan to make any profit on someone else's intellectual property, then there should be no issue. I've tried out MP3Gopher, but that got canned before it could be useful to me. So I played around with several packet capture tools. Leave it to the Open Source community to have the best one on the market, "Wireshark". Here's how you do it.

1. Start a packet capture session.
2. Load song via http. This works for sites like hype machine as well as MySpace. All the service needs to do is stream audio over http (or any other protocol that wireshark recognises - a lot) and you're fine.
3. There will be a bunch of stream continuations, but at the end of the download, there will be a packet that marks the stream as an "mpeg/audio". This is the last packet
4. Now you select that packet and click "Analyse > Follow TCP Stream".
5. Save the entire conversation somewhere on your machine as "SongName.mp3".
6. Find a text editor that doesn't do weird encode/decode a file's bytes on read/write (I use vim) and open that file. Delete the HTTP request / response crap at the top of the file and save it.
7. You now have your mp3. Try it out in your audio player.

On "Cities and Ambition"

Ok, those of you who know me, know that I've been trying out different cities for the last 3 years now. Most people looked at that with a mixture of awe ("New York? Wow, exciting!!"), puzzlement ("What's wrong with Toronto?"), fear ("Berlin? new culture, languge, social circle, ieee"). What was more compelling to me, than any of those emotions, was the prospect of not having seen the world or strived to free myself, developing my creative, intellectual and other human facilities. That to me would be horrendous. But only a few people I knew seemed to even understand those motivations, much less consider the pros and cons of acting on them.

So I nearly fell out of my seat, refreshed at reading Paul Graham's new essay "Cities and Ambition". "Finally someone understands!!!!" It confounded me for the longest time, how people I knew couldn't see any of this. When I decided to leave Toronto, I made a firm decision that I wanted to spend my life doing interesting work. But first, I needed to find an interesting place to "be" and I needed to own my own time. So places like Berlin and London had a level of civility, dynamism, discourse, etc that made me "feel" like I can "be" myself - intelligent, expressive, etc. I'm currently working on the "time" bit.

When I was deciding what to do, I knew I needed to do it while I was still young with a lot of energy. But I wasn't sure of the order all of this should take. As moving cities is very uprooting, I decided to tackle that first. Here's the steps I have mapped out. This may or may not be the best path as I didn't know how to start at the beginning:

1. [done] choose city to live
2. [in progress] own my own time [one] [two] [three]
   
3. [lifelong pursuit] interesting work / social network

Thank-you thank-you thank-you Paul.

Technology Management Program UCSB: WIFI

A good talk on the beginnings of the Internet and the emergence of mesh networks among other topics. OLPC is such a device using mesh network technology.

"Mr. Bryan was also recognized in September of 1994 as one of the founders of the Internet."

Conversations with History: Wole Soyinka

"On this edition of Conversations with History, UC Berkeley's Harry Kreisler talks with Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. In an extraordinarily prolific and rich body of work including plays, novels, poems, and essays, Professor Soyinka draws on both Yoruba and western culture to exquisitely weave a subtle understanding of the tragedy and comedy of the human condition."

Why Hackers FLOSS

http://blog.milkingthegnu.org/2008/05/why-hackers-floss.html

This absolutely describes why I got into software instead of finance when I finished University. And it's hard to get across to employers / managers why play and creativity actually produces more competent developers and better software. Paul Graham, Eric Raymond, and many others have testified to this.

What's With All these Hot Authors!!!

I'm about half way through Zadie Smith's "On Beauty", and it's another laugh out loud piece. A finely tuned story about race, class and identity in Amarican academia, it's up there with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "Half Of a Yellow Sun". "Books by attractive people are better. It’s just true. :-)" said a colleague. One would think so. Well consider "On Beauty" recommended.