To all that have not personally recieved new years blessings and to all who care - I wish you a great 2009. May the world wake up from last century and we go into a bright sustainable nature connected future full of pleasant surprises and pecked with knowledge wonderful things.
This is going to be a multipart series on my view on the webdesign process in this day and age with nitty gritty details - to much for most casual readers but not enough for the more professional webbers but just about right to those making websites coming from a more design perspective touching each and every part that touches webdesign as a whole - from the artwork to the programming to the content management to the hosting problems to the philosophies, existing standards nobody cares about nonexisting standards everyone seems to care about. Guaranteed not flash bashing free and guaranteed full of sarcasm. Here is the intro to this never ending saga.
About ten to twelve years ago I got into developing my first website - back then I was neither designer nor programmer but had experience in the latter and was about to study the former. I made this website with a lot of javascript and made the mistake of using images as text as I wanted one font throughout the site. The site looked alright (to me ;) and functioned fine but was unmaintainable for a person who wants to do something else with their time then hacking pure HTML. It had one nice feature so - that was swappable images - something you see nowadays a lot in those fancy iFrame galleries - back then I did not encounter another site that had it. Oh javascript that was something I could identify with as it came so close to BASIC programming which I learned while the east was still the east and the west the bad. "You can´t use javascript, its bad practice - nobody should use javascript ever" was all I got for my month long effort of making a webpage. The site was sitting there for a long long time without any updates and got very stale - at one point - right after the only update it ever recieved -the browsers started to break the site and I decided to pull it.
Since then I have been pondering on making a new site - one with a cool content management system that would enable me to easely update the site, one that is very cutting edge and puts technology to a good use. The longer I pondered the more it became clear that I did not want a website for myself - but rather a framework that could be an umbrella for the myriads of my interests and those around me wanting to produce something cool together with me. On the design end I was still learning and trying to find my style my design mojo. The years went by and the website did not really progress other then in my head. There was a quick attempt at it about 3 years ago that had already an interface designed but that never off the ground because I actually had to finish my diploma and all. Then last years pushed by a lot of different things I actually started to take the plunge - and man if I would have known back then what a journey it would become I would have thought twice about going along, but now 35.000 lines of code and about a year later I am extremely happy with the outcome so far.
Next Part in the next days: Choosing the right Content Management System
Sometimes you stumble over articles where you need to rub your eyes slap your hand against your head take a couple of deep deep breath and try to wave the little birdie coming out of your screen goodbye. Today was such a day again. The newly appointed London mayor - the first conservative London mayor since generations - has said that media companies should stop "underestimating" young people and stop "target" them with "cheap" hiphop and instead educate them to "higher" art like classical music and operas.
No I am absolutely not kidding. He wants to spent money so parents can send their kids to learn classical instruments.
Now - nothing against funding of letting people learn classical instruments - but who the fuck does he think to suggest hiphop or any other youth culture is "cheap art" and why does he think he can define what "high culture" is?
In a report outlining his strategy, his chief of arts and culture strategy, Munira Mirza, argues that too much emphasis has been placed on making events "user-friendly".
ugh? make parties user unfriendly so nobody goes to them anymore? See classical concert halls are empty for a fucking reason and that is that young people are BORED TO DEATH hearing songs that have been written 200 years ago and have not evolved since then. It might be an artform where rich kids are pressed into and then can behave as if they are something special - but the innovation in musical art comes from the street the dark warehouses the garages all over the world not some on multimillion dollar live support hanging concert houses that are playing Beethoven the 9th for the 2 millions' time. You rich conservative mummies you need to get out more - especially when you are the mayor of a city that used to be trendsetting when it comes to music.
Give Young People High Culture Not HipHop - Johnson. The Guardian
Two incidents - very unlike one another - intermingled at their core idea. Citizens discontent spoken out loud and clear one heard one damned - one embraced one ignored one solved one clashing.
One for the right to work in China one for the right to party in Germany.
Unlikely role reversed? Or propaganda failing to work?
So this is the day when there is the decision if the human capitalistic world will either die fast or slow. The day when the americans will for once not disappoint, or when the machines rise and take matters into their shadowy masters hands. Its just the day the world has been waiting for the last eight years, they day when everything might change or nothing. dailykos.com has an election prediction game going on for those that want to win a MacBook - I was inclined to take part, after closing about 10.000 people took part in the gamble. Here is my ridiculous prediction:
57 Democratic Senate seats
41 Republican Senate seats
260 Democratic House seats
175 Republican House seats
384 Obama Electoral Votes
154 McCain Electoral Votes
55.4 Obama Popular Vote Percentage
43.3 McCain Popular Vote Percentage
I think this election will be a blowout - if it isn´t its because their are dirty tricks - but since the margins in the trackers are so overwhelmingly Obama across the line even in states that have never voted for a democrat in over 20 years and the voter turnout machine of Obama seems to be on a scale never seen before too I would think that the republicans are not so inclined to alter the vote considerably as this would quite certainly mean civil war and I tend to believe that even a lot of Republicans won´t want that as that would nullify their assets over night - and money is all they think of when they go into an election. So I predict this blowout scenario above. I call Florida and Ohio for Obama and I don´t give McCain the slightest chance that he takes Pennsylvania (that is were the fraud would happen if it happens by the way). I give Obama another 1-2 states because of the cellphone problem of most polls (polls including cellphone users tend to poll be 2% higher for Obama) and because of his ground forces organization.
I am a bit sad that South Dakota is not as close as North Dakota - that would have been my favorite pickup for a Democrat.
But in the end there is not much change going to happen in the US of A with either presidential candidate. With McCain the fall would go really fast, Obama might be able to prolong the fall for another 1-2 years, but with the massive debt currently in the country, the two biggest car companies failing and with the whole country on the credit syringe anybodies hand trying to run the country are tight - except if this person attempts to switch to another political system - which no mainstream US candidate will ever try.
We will continue a tradition tonight watching the polls coming in and discussion politics, current and future ones - and todays topic is more a future political system then the current US election. If you know me or mogreens and want to have a fruitful talk come over to mogreens house tonight after 21 CET.
Since I get my last wisdom teeth pulled in about 20 minutes I thought I share the last bit of wisdom in me - no actually I am in a gloomy doomy mood and want to spread that around - no in fact I think topic is too important to be pulled out with my wisdom teeth - anyway...
I have talked to a lot of people about the "financial crisis" in the last weeks and to everyone I talked to it seemed a bit distant to affect them personally (with the few exceptions of the persons who are in the doom camp already). They all had to endure my preaching - if one bit of the capitalistic market comes to a proper grind the whole system collapses. Why do I think that? Look at the world out there. This whole system is like a house of cards, carefully stacked on top of each other of the last 100 years. One layer of cards made the next layer possible and then the next and the next. The bottom layer is comprised of the oil chain and the food chain, next one is housing, then transport, then consumer goods, then luxury goods (its much more fine grained but you get the idea). Now the thing with house of cards is that any part can topple the whole deck - even those on top - but the ones underneath definitely topple everything. Another analogy I am using is clockworks. If just one of the tiny teeth (ha you thought I would get around the post without mentioning teeth again he ;) is being pulled out the result is that the whole clockwork consisting of millions of teeth is coming to a halt. So same with modern day capitalism with a global supply and demand scheme. One part of the whole system stands still the rest will follow very very soon. Now the thing with the "financial crisis" is that at first it doesn´t look like it will affect you personally (not unless a savings bank is bankrupt and people flock to the ATMs to get their nonexistent money out - its all virtual - there is no money because it has all been lend out and then some). I have been watching with open eyes because I believed that pulling that much money from under the market out there must have an affect somewhere in the "real" market (not the virtual "we trade empty numbers" money market) rather sooner then later. Well it seems that food is actually the one thing that might be affected first.
Yes food the thing everyone needs for living. Why? Because our food system at the moment depends on proper fertilization and since everyone just wanted to make profit in the last years they ignored any natural fertilization cycle (crop rotation for example) and instead poisened the field by overloading it with industrial NPK (Nitrogen Phosphorous, Potassium) fertilization techniques. To switch a field from that to a natural cycle takes about 5 years minimum. Now why is that important? NPK fertilizers are freakishly expensive (big part of it is made from natural gas f.e.) and since the banks are extremely nervous they do not give the farmers any loans to get fertilizers - which had been the norm up till this year. No fertilizers mean that on bad fields you can loose up to 70% of your crop. Thats 70% less food on the market - that means skyrocking prices in the supermarket that means a lot of people will be hungry - what this means I don´t want to think about.
This is one scenario of how the system might collapse - one that is already in the making (means its already happening to some extend). There are more paths to doom but happily also some paths out so not all is lost. Then again looking at the world politics I have not that much hope for a instant enlightening of the ruling caste.
Millions will starve (on dailykos.com)
Recent rains have improved seeding conditions, allowing farmers to begin planting soybeans in parts of Mato Grosso, Brazil. Farmers now face another problem, the lack of fertilizer. Even farmers with access to credit have not received their fertilizer due to a distribution delay. A Cuiaba newspaper reports that one producer who normally plants about 15,000 acres of soybeans will plant 10,000 this year because he did not receive enough fertilizer
...
With food and energy prices soaring around the world, a constant supply of high-quality, affordable food is no longer guaranteed, the officials are warning Britons. That could mean an era of scarcity like Britain's 1940-54 food rationing, during the war and its aftermath
Saturday is a good day to reflect on life (for me somehow always better then sundays where I just want to be outside and clear my mind). So stumbling over an actual insightful article that is more philosophical then political, is somehow timeless is a great joy. So today I did stumble over such an article by the "Daily Dish" blogger of The Atlantic Andrew Sullivan. The article is called "Why I blog" and is very very long but I would suggest that every blogger wades through it. I always enjoy Andrews witty insightfull political commentary and this article outside the political scope is no different. Its a nice description of what blogs are where they came from and how they tick. The money quote on page one:
"For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud."
Blogging as an accident prone fun alive extreme sport. Its is intimate but public exposing yourself to the outside world by informing the outside world of your thinking and becoming a puzzle piece of the world wide narrative.
Sullivan also offers an insight why blogging is such a boon to the writing crowd compared to constant delays reediting and rewriting in more traditional medias. This makes it possible to be more fearless (coming back to the extreme sports category) when publishing more directly speaking ones mind.
You have to express yourself now, while your emotions roil, while your temper flares, while your humor lasts. You can try to hide yourself from real scrutiny, and the exposure it demands, but it’s hard. And that’s what makes blogging as a form stand out: it is rich in personality.
A very recommended read.
So why do I blog? Mainly because I believe in the world narrative being written by bloggers and everyone should be part of it - its the personal angle the one where politics, the environment and the arts matter (to me). Secondly to give out some of what I learned online offline through trial and error through accidents through investigative passion that sometimes creeps up on me. Thirdly to put spotlight on local events because I blog in english but live in Germany I have a different audience then MoGreens for example that just resonates to different parts of the world who might be interested what happens in this small community over here.
Most of all blogging is a lot of fun and full of surprises its somehow makes you feel like you are a human beeing and not just an ant in a system. If you don´t blog you should try it out one day its liberating.
If all this sounds postmodern, that’s because it is. And blogging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective.
Your business model is about to fail in an epic drama because over the last 10-20 years you have not invested into new ideas, you have not looked beyond your faith of the economy flushing you with cash, you have not even invested in good content. You got into a spiral of self fulfilling prophecy - ever worst content to please the ever shrinking lowest common denominator. And worse of all you have tried to buy out ideas from outside your scope, tried to humiliate those that don´t work with you, tried to stop any content business model that isn´t formed around your believe of distribution of media power. You close your eyes when its aparent that copying things from one media to the other has never worked and will never work as most different kind of medias have a completely different underlaying social behaviour, modelled on that a completely different user interface and so dear old media fusing your failed business model with a social model that is not even build to be a business model and try first and foremost to generate ad revenues by connecting people and giving them an very expensive chat window on their tv screen which they interface - wait for it - with an iphone or similar network enabled device - this dear old media is so falling flat on its face (not even to mention that a remote control is also not the best input tool to engage in socialising activity of any extended sort). Please get it and stop your desperate attempts to save your failed business by trying to mimic real innovation that is about the people first and foremost and money only as an enabler. Try to see were your old business model can help future generation, heck become an archive and let people search in the past - and even charge some administrative fees for it or do live broadcasts or even just let people rent your facilities to make people powered media - but please see the light and see that people want real interaction, people want to publish want to speak their own voice and the TV or a dead tree newpaper is not the medium to deliver that - it was never designed to do that and to make it work is like trying to transform a school bus into a first class ultrasonic airplane that can carry 2000 people at once.
A response to the aptly titled article "TV+Social Network=?" on the wall stree journal.
I have been looking for years to get a "perfect" midi controller for my live visual endeavors. That is no exageration. I have high expectations toward a midi controller. I want to lug it around the world - so it has to be small enough. I want to a plethora of functions on it so it actually helps me perform and is not just a gimmick. It has to be robust to withstand outdoor gigs with sandy gusts and water spray as well as indoor gigs sweat dropping from the ceiling and 80°C heat from above lamps. It has to be scalable and adaptable to new software coming along and it somehow has to fit my own style of performing - which means the knobs need to be properly soldered on - the faders have a solid feel and the buttons been tested to withstand 1.000.000 times pressing.
I have been impressed with the Mawzer concept two or three years ago because it was poised to deliver on that promise. Yet the final product they came up with is much less extensible and much more expensive and much bigger then what was originally proposed - the midi controller for everyone it was not. So I was looking up on building your own. There are kits out there and with access to lasercutters through the web that looked like a good alternative. There was only one problem - someone would have needed to shower me with some time to make such a project feasible. Soldering, testing building rebuilding a midi controller is - no matter how good the kit you are bying - a task of months. Sure you have the perfect controller in the end for your needs but the time to get there I would rather spend on creating content that looks whicked.
Then along came a project (next blog entry in a minute) that requires to leave my trusty videomixer (an edirol V4 1st generation) at home because it ain´t going through the old route of outputting digital video through an analog cable back to a digital projector - but instead it goes digitally over the air directly to the very analog output. So the only piece of hardware that gave me direct access to my output outside of the laptop I have to toss out for that even - and since the event is quite big and lot of focus will be on what I am doing a replacement for that loss had to come.
But lets make a little detour. Some might ask "oh you have the laptop as input controller". Yes thats true and while I use the keyboard of the laptop extensively and I can feel blind where the cursor is when using the trackpad there are still some things that are not fast enough using the computer. For example changing the speed of a video clip. There is just nothing that allows you to quickly do that - quickly as in "make decission in one beat of a 120bpm clip and have the speed change at latest at the 4th beat or next downbeat". For that direct control is absolutely necessary.
So I had another information scavenging on the interwebs to see if there is any solution to my controller need. I looked at all the ones that are used by vj friends. Cheap ones, expensive ones. I tried to imagine using them and always came up with shortcomings. Most are just too big with too little functionality - not one would fullfill all my needs in one piece. I need Trigger pads, Sliders, Knobs, Rotaries and lots of them - like LOADS of them and as said in a small package to travel. I almost gave up seeing myself trying to move the mouse cursor in unmatched fashion to some crappy output.
Then I stumbled over faderfox. I don´t know how I got there and its even a german company - I have missed them all those years. Apparently they are very well known in the tracktor/live world of musicians - I jut had never seen someone using one of the controllers they offer nor have I ever stumbled across their website.
Their website at first put me off a bit - as you might have noticed in the beginning paragraph - I need some serious professional gear. I just don´t want anything to break half way through a performance. Things need to be sturdy and the knobs and faders and buttons of exceptional quality to not loose that great break in the music that might make a difference for the feel of a whole performance. So a website that looks like its done in the mid 90s and never been updated makes me suspicious as of the professionalism - yet in my midi research I found out already that the midi hardware guys don´t have a great sense of astethics when it comes to websites (doepfer anyone?). Also on their front page was something that was so ultimately intriguing that no bad design could ever throw me off before I figured out more.
What I saw was a modular midi controller concept of ultra small units that are made for ultra portability. And on top I could figure out instantly that all I need in control ever is there in a maximum of five units - with three units already controller heaven. I googled a bit more and found out that people who bought them liked them and where impressed with their professional feel. They are even running battery powered and three of them are not wider then a typical apple pro lappy. Also the DJ2 unit they offer pretty much replaces all the controllers of my Eridol V4 videomixer. So I ordered one.
The order was processed with human kindness (yes a person on the other end - seemingly the developer himself) and delivered in outstanding speed (next day after money arrived). But what I got blew all my expectations. Not only was the controller everything that was advertised - lightweight, professional build quality - faders as solid as they can be - but it was way more versatile then I ever thought. You know you look at a controller and see all the buttons and your mind maps them to functions, but this controller crams more functions in his small space then most other controllers I have looked at 10 times its size. Buttons are all dual configurable with the shift button - that means there are 36 button messages you can get out of the controller, the xy joystick (which ist sooo smooth) can send on four different channels - switchable in a nanosecond, the two rotary controller send out continuus data on 12 different channels and notes on four and have a "push down" event on eight channels. All Sliders and knobs can be muted to avoid jumps on the controlled buttons by holding down the shift key. Everything works flawlessly after a week of testing (so the rotaries are not supported by VDMX yet (nor by quartz composer) which sucks) and its a lot of fun using. There is a (chainable in case you get more controllers from them) poweradapter coming as extra add on, it all supports midi chaining and midi through. Batteries are included and are supposed to hold 80 hours (so through the longest club session ever if you are so inclined). I can recommend this whole heartly to anyone out there - especially vjs - looking for that perfect transportable midi controller with more control then the mind allows. The price - so it does seem steep for such a "small" thing - is fully warranted.
While impressive looking the fire departments are dumping more chemicals into california wildfires every day. The Phos-Check fire retardant is surely making the company who produces them very rich. They claim "its nothing other then a fertilizer" and on surface it looks like it:
From an australian research report:
Any amount of unaltered (un-burnt) Phos-Check would act as a direct source of N, P, S to the environment.
but just before it says:
The retardent also contains < 5% by weight of a range of performance additives that are confidential to the manufacturer, but the composition of which were made available to the consultant under a confidality agreement. The effect of high temperatures on these compounds is unknown.
Now that is a sentence that would get me worried but it goes on and does not get much more pretty.
Some of the additive compounds in Phos-Check are potentially harmful to biological systems and human health. Very little is known of the impacts of these in natural environments, including their longevity or transport in aquatic systems.
So while the main components are good fertilizers (so I still doubt dumping huge amount of sulfuric acids can be very good) the 5% that are under "confidentiality" are known to cause health problems and problems to the environments and they are know to be washed into rivers and streams with the next rain after the fires.
While I know that fires are really hell for the people living in the affected areas I also know that forest fires are a natural phenomenon that is actually helping the local area by supplying it with good natural fertilization from the charcoal burnt wood. And most of the fires ranging in the US lately can also be attributed to overcrowding areas that just do not sustain people in the long run in the manner of fashion that is common these days (level and betonize everything in sight, tear down everything in sight, put rivers into concrete walls so they can not flood anything that might need it, make the woods look "pretty" by clearing everything that isn´t in a straight line etc etc). And also people moving into these areas should surely know about the risks involved (and should look how they can help nature doing its thing to make everything more flourishing - that might include controlled fires etc).
One thing is for sure - dumping chemicals onto areas where its hard for trees to settle in the first place will make things rather worse in the long run and probably also have severe health effects on the local population.
More photos of Phos-Check dumping here.
The very scarce wikipedia entry on Phos-Check.
Today I got the third invitation for a new "Web 3.0" applications "private" "beta". This one was for a service called twine and is basically a way to organize digital stuff - as wide as you want to describe stuff.
It has made me thinking why I am reluctant to spend more then 20 minutes with these services, why I don´t have a flickr account, why am not contributing to wikipedia and I have a conclusion that any of these companies should take to heart because I sincerely believe that I might not be the only one with this thought.
In a time where time seems to be the most important resource a person can posses I want to spend time so it benefits my future - and with that the future of the planet as well (because without it I wouldn´t have one). I love collective wisdom (as in wikipedia) I benefit greatly from it every day, but I have also been around the net long enough to know that spending hundreds of hours on forums, wikis etc. is a lost cause if this information you give out does not stay in your control. I don´t mean that I want to control the flow of this information, also I don´t want to control its death but I want to stay in control to keep it alive. I have been using the net in some form or another for about 13+ years now and I have seen a lot of the information I gave to it disappear forever into some unknown electric universe. Now companies are craving to organize not just my words but my pictures, videos, pfd documents - basically my knowledge - so that others can access it and find it easily - the so called web 3.0 or the semantic web. I applaud that thought as it will ultimately lead to a greater collective wisdom, but I also have shivers down my spine when I think that in the future I collect all my information on somebody elses machines. As I have just layed out companies on the web tend to diy sudden death, or swallowed up by corporation that have ill intends (yahoo->microsoft f.e. where delicious hosts tons of my precious links I collected over the years) or a change of leadership makes the wrong decisions, or they have a failed backup plan and all data is lost (just happened with a big internet provider in the US who lost mails from about a million mail accounts). Its just too much trust I would have to give out my most precious resource - time - to someone I don´t know, someone who could morph into someone else, someone who could become evil that I don´t want to be affiliated with. So I don´t think the solution for me is called twine or powerlabs or whatever - I think the solutions has to look different.
I want to have control over the longlevity of my information - yet I still like the idea of a collective organization of all knowledge in the world. So I see a decentralized structure of knowledge sharing as the better way forward. You know all that is needed is a standard that would put all the knowledge on my servers out in the open - to be freely harvested by semantic web engines. I can then keep my internal organizational structure, use tags or hierarchies or groups or whatever to let the outside world know what these documents mean and then the web 3.0 companies can just take this and put it in pretty easy to use interfaces and connect with information with other people. If one of those companies goes bust you still have not only the information but also the organization of this information and a different service can come along and use it all. Its sort of like the Open Social platform that tries to do exactly this with social networking (again I want to be in control to whom the time goes that I spend without a lock in and without a feeling that I loose everything).
So for Web 3.0 to really kick off you need something like an OpenSemantics framework that can be implemented into just about any information collecting tool out there (blogs, wikis, even forums). Something that helps you tag, organize, auto-organize your information and makes it available to others out there. It has to be an open source standard that is extendible to a lot of information carriage formats and probably it has to be pushed by something like the W3C to give it enough traction to gain any footing against these thousand of new "web 3.0" startups.
Until then I refuse to give out more time to any of these things no matter how many "private beta" invites they send me.
you read headlines like Transgender man is pregnant or Man regrows his cut off fingertip with pigs bladder powder (so this one could also come from the dark ages witches ;) or Engineers Test Highly Accurate Face Recognition or that google thinks it has a turing test capable AI to be used for natural language search. Now if it would all just translate to now for everyone instead of in the lab sometimes in the future the future would have arrived - yet no proof, concept art, concept essays, blog posts is all we get while our pals drive our CO2 emissions to levels where the world might have a heart attack before any of these things pan out - I for one could live with some real news that are not political that are not sci-fi wishes futuretelling that are actually bringing mankind ahead instead of make them dream - then again I see most of the westworldpopulation living in an alternate universe where global warming gives some tension, there is no banking crisis, war is only in a different world and all problems have only one side to look at - the look at them self is forbidden by death.
I was waiting and hoping and hoping that what I saw and heard would not be true that it was an exageration by the media. I believed firmly that this could not happen - not now anymore. As some of you know I was in that holiest of holy lands in the year 2000. Its one of the places on earth where you go and come back as a changed person if you look beyond the golden roofs, into the spirituality into the people into the high treeless land. Yet what changed me most was a multiple days talk with a young tibetan monk about buddhism, about tibet, about politics about Tibets past and its future - and for me in the end one thing was clear - there is no Tibet without China anymore, the occupation has been made permanent and the Tibetans slowly started to realise this and tried to adjust their lives accordingly tried to save their culture nonetheless. But it was also clear that there are still warriors among the Tibetans - those who would want to fight - those who wait for a chance to blow up the next bridge - but these people have been by far far the minority. Back then even the Dalai Lama admitted that the goal for Tibetans should be cultural sovereignty - politically they stand no chance at the sleeping giant dragon.
Now I don´t know exactly what happened but I do actually believe the Chinese media account because that is exactly what I saw when I was there 8 years ago.
Peaceful march in India joined by prayer ceremonies in Lhasa - organised by the Dalai Lama. Extreme World Wide Media attention - those who still want to fight stir up trouble, poor Tibetans living in Lhasa take opertunity to go against some Han-Chinese controlled shops - sleeping dragon awakes, sees no difference between the friendly protestors, monks and the raving mob - especially since the main monestaries involved are right inside Lhasas Tibetan district - kills them all (and I truly believe the 300 dead number floated around is understimating the real toll of what happened). More restrictions in Lhasa (which have always been there but where not enforced heavily btw) complete news blackout, closing of monestaries (making them pure tourist attractions in return) and the only dream left for the Tibetans - to save their culture, religion and spirituality - might be lost forever.
Who to blame? Western media arrogance in thinking they are helping by giving the protests such a huge feedback without talking about the dangers of a Tibetan uprising that stands no chance and therefore giving the violent groups of both sides a good reason to exploit the peacefull presentation of their original goals. And yes I do not only blame mainstream media but also some mainstream blogs like boingboing who should have known better then just spread a meme.
I never understood how google is making these shitloads of money because I can not believe that "click throughs" most of them accidental give advertisers any kind of leg up in the market. It seems my suspicion is right as a recent article on slashdot notes:
"A recent study finds that 6% of Web users generate 50% of the click-throughs. Worse news for advertisers: these clickers are not representative of the population as a whole, most have incomes under $40K, and their clicks are not related to any offline buying. (They are mostly males between 25 and 44 years of age.) The number of clicks on an ad campaign is also not strongly correlated with brand awareness for the ads' subject, according to the study. This is bad news for ad-supported Web sites and businesses, as rates should drop if the Net economy begins to take these findings seriously."
JNo brand awareness - no translation to actually go out and by a thing neither online nor offline - so what the heck is the use of online ads - especially unbranded adwords in general? But my suspicion goes even further - advertising as a whole in its current form of super branding and subtle force buying has seen the end of life on any media. People are over saturated by XX thousand brands competing for their brain cells and actually people find they might wanna use their braincells for something else. I would say as with the decline of TV we will also see a decline of advertisements in the coming years - now the question begs -> no brands -> no advertisements -> no free money -> no free culture? or is it free culture -> no brands -> no money -> no advertisement?
I once had a friend who advocated a free society, a bottom up approach to living and pushing digital technology so that these ideas could strive and feed a free society. A discussion on one of his articles on one of his blogs did garner a lot of attention and spawned lots of unregulated discussion, a fruitful discussion among what one would think are part time intellectuals or generally people who have a belief - something that is not found very often in this society of blind followers. Sadly the aforementioned person did not fully understand that he was using a two way medium that does spawn those discussions and only if it does it has a chance to live up to its full potential as a new medium that breaks free with traditional push only media. I am sad to see this blindness taking hold instead of trying to find a technical solution he switched back to the push-publishing dark-ages killing the quite violent but also fruitful discussion in its tracks, since his is no blog anymore by definition but rather a static internet dark age website it also disappears from my blog roll - I am deeply disappointed not only at his standpoint in the discussion (again this is is debatable and everyone is entitled to his standpoint as long as it is his own and everyone has supporting arguments which in this discussion every side had more or less good ones) but much much more to his control approach toward his blog readers. Yes a discussion like this is scary and sure I would have understood if this was getting into a huge flame war - but it wasn´t. Every side - emotionally charged - presented their case with lots of good questions to the other side and most of the time things stayed pretty much on topic (so the topic was wider then the blog entry imposed). There was simply no need to cut off the discussion nor was there a need to cut of all comments on the blog.
I just read a german study about media use in the "future" (PDF! warning). Its done by the "Gesellschaft für Innovative Marktforschung" (Society for Innovate Marketing Research) and boy are they a clueless bunch of wannabees.
take the following statement:
Vor allem das Internet wird hier eine entscheidende Rolle spielen und die etablierten (Massen- )Medien vor große Herausforderungen stellen. Die Nutzungsdichte innerhalb der nachwachsenden Generationen zeigt, dass sich das Internet zukünftig als ein neuer „Big Player“ im Konzert der wichtigsten Medien einreihen wird.
(It translates along the lines of "The internet will be playing an important part in the future and will pose a threat to established media.)
Well let me break it to you the internet IS a major player in the content market. Traditional media has been delagated to place 2, 3 and 4 in the target group of 14-19 year olds already and traditional media is already a dying species. We are in 2008 not in 2005 anymore. I can go on with more quotes out of this redicioulus paper that go along the same line - basically the people who wrote it (one studied politics the other socio-economy) should look for a different job because they are writing about a media as if it where at a standstill the last three years, but the media itself is living in the future constantly. The study reads like someone has not got that the whole "web2.0" thing is already a bursting bubble that was so much hype and from the beginning a mere marketing scheme for things already in place since internet 1.0.
one more quote:
Medien müssen sich daher zum einen als Plattformen verstehen, die den Nutzern bei Bedarf die Möglichkeit einer aktiven Mitgestaltung in der Auswahl der Inhalte bzw. des Programmflows bietet.
(Media must see itself as a platform that gives their users - if required - the possibility of an active co-designing of the content selection or the programm flow)
LOL... People ARE CREATING THEIR OWN MEDIA. If TV stations rush to the net now and give the user the possibility - if required - of co-designing their content selection or program flow - all TV stations will die an even faster death then they will eventually do anyway. People grab stuff from everywhere there is no brand loyalty anymore - its only the content that counts and that will be more and more created by the people who watch it them self. No wonder with these kind of studies that the traditional media is so far behind in their thinking. And just creating a "community" will backfire shorter or later because everyone is building "artificial" communities - at one point there are so many online communities as there are websites and then NONE of these communities will provide any value to anyone because people will just spend their time on their own community - which is rooted in real life.
The fragmentation of media is already taking its toll - the only ones who take a toll is the traditional media. Just ask your kid from next block how much tv he/she/it watches, how much its is on the interweb and how much of the time it watches tv its also on the intertube at the same time (having the tv as an ambient noise generator) and how much of this tv watching is really about 1 or 2 shows that would also easely be watched on the iTubes as soon as this is a viable option and how much less tv its gonna watch then and that it won´t care where the content is coming from in the first place and the trillions of places it could come from and the nonexisting filter and the paradise and the user generated content that draws them away from one place. ANALYST DUDES: The future is much more complex then just extrapolating media habits of yesterday to tommorrow - look around you stop reading the net and interview your "target" group. The future for big media is bleak, its scattered already all across the floor - we are aiming at a free media culture and you aint be able to do shit about it just speeding it up with "predictions" like this. (they are even getting paid -by big media - to do this - hilarious). Oh and read "settop boxes" in there somewhere - now let see if anyone ever makes a settop box that actually sells (appleTV I am looking at you) - because if not then its clear that the TV as the central hub of media is also loosing its status symbol and maybe even "the big screen" as well. It will only be there for immersive games and the rest is done on the portable screen (or the contact lenses). "onDemand" - is two words that already lost there meaning - on the interwebs ALL content is on demand or it does not exist.
The paper ends with the following statement:
Angesichts des hohen Stellenwerts von Fernsehen und Radio werden diese beiden Medien mit Sicherheit auch in der kommenden Dekaden eine herausragende Bedeutung besitzen. Daneben wird sich in Zukunft immer stärker das Internet etablieren.
(In the light of the high significance of TV and radio those two medias will with certainty have an outstanding importance in the coming decades . In the future the internet will establish itself alongside.
bold predictions guys n gals... now isn´t the internet already an established media - or did I miss something the last 10 years? and how much importance is certainty in the coming freaking DECADES?
I could go on and dissect every single sentence in this "buzzword complient" "ANALysis" but I leave the exercise for the dear reader if they dare....
As noted before Movable Type has been put under the GPL (Gnu General Public License) which means its open source and free as in speech and the bare bone version also free as in beer. We have used Movable Type from the beginning and just couldn´t - wouldn´t want to to migrate to a different platform as it always seemed to much hassle. Also we coughed up the small fee for a multisite blog (that was a point where we almost switched). This is all past us now and it seems we have bet on a long distance horse with our blogging software. Now I think a company developing the software and having their business model not to sell the software but to sell distributions and support will be the business model for all software rather sooner then later (quote me in 10 years). Because with a truly open source approach you have tons of helping hands in your code to make it better more stable faster secure and saturate it with plugged in feature at no cost. You as a company are still the ones who know the software best (you coded it from the start) so you are probably the best to help big corporations to install it - meanwhile the free nature of your software allows anyone to get used to and train them self to use it, generating a legion of enthusiast who in return will advocate your software over closed source alternatives giving you company a sustainable income - everyone is happy. This approach is also in my opinion much better then the all non leader community approach of free software (for example wordpress) with no real direction and to many side roads leading to stagnation or confusion among users (drupal is also one of those beasts, buts thats about to change to).
As said I think sooner or later most of the software industry comes around this business model. I am very happy that I don´t need to think about migrating the two active blogs.
Or the nitpicky Leopard longtime user review
As some of you know I am actively involved/enrolled with the Appleseed which is apples closed beta testing group for a lot of their software. I have been doing just that since about seven years now and its always a lot of fun mixed with a lot of frustration and a lot of pleasure if you see the bug that you reported fixed or that enhancement request you did make it into the final version. Recently I have been actively involved in Leopard testing - for the last 14 month that is.
As we Appleseeder are halfly lifted from our non disclosure agreement with the release of the final version I would like to talk about a user perspective in the OS for a short paragraph.
Its been a slow coming and a lot of builds I could not test because my equipment was not compatible but in the end just a month before the release they send us a build where magically a lot of problems went away - yet the first time I installed Leopard I got this urge not to go back - even so I did not see any major improvement that would justify this reaction. But its the small things and now after the 14 month I can safely say that I have never ever seen such a productivity improvement when upgrading to an OS.
My absolute favorite - and once you get used to it you gonna see why - is: SPACES.
Designate spaces for different work conditions (one for 3D, one for video editing, one for still picture editing, one for office stuff, one for system stuff f.e.) assign programs to these spaces and remember what space number is what and all of the sudden all messy window overlapping is past – forever. I can not stress how great this works and urge everyone to take the time to set up individual spaces (drag and drop apps you use into the space preference panel and assign a space number). Spaces is whicked fast even on my old (now dead) Titanium Powerbook 1Ghz.
Time Machine is a mixed blessing – while I like the idea the whole thing is a typically 1.0 version. I personally would not use it and I know that some testers had serious problems with it. The lack of fine graned controllability is a real bummer – an "advanced setting" button is missing – I hate it.
Safari had been a surprise – I though it would suck first but the new search is amazing. It is the first search that real gives you a visual feedback – I love it totally.
Also the new DEBUG menu goes long ways – not Firebug yet but already very close with full inspection of boxmodels, load times, page code etc – great (you have to enable the debug menue to see this in action).
Bluetooth and syncing is vastly improved in speed and stability.
The new dock is a step up I guess but nothing revolutionary. I do like to use the stacks as launch managers for programs – for anything else they are useless as they only display a certain amount of files and I find myself to just use the open in Finder button inside the stacks all the time for folders that change content a lot – spaciality is not Apple core competence these days and as soon as you do serious stuff that is still a big problem.
BUT they are making headway's here and there. The "new" finder had been a huge disappointment for me at first as they put up a new face without fundamentally change the underbelly – this seems to have changed a tiny bit so in the latest releases after a big backlash inside the seeder community. I can care less if we have coverflow in the finder, but I see the reason why it in there. For me the only possible reason to put coverflow inside the finder is to use it with a multitouch input device because coverflow with a mouse is just painfully slow but I can imagine it to be great to flick you fingers through your files this way. Generally the finder window is MUCH better then before. It seems more ordered and once you get over yourself and accept new things bring change it is actually quite usable. And, hey, individual windows REMEMBER there setting now. So when you set folder to list view next time you open it it actually opens in list view. It took them 7 years to get this functionality in since the seeders posted a million and one Enhancement requests about it but hey better late then never. Sadly so it still does not remember where the window was placed last time you opened it – this is still the single biggest problem for me in the finder interface. Oh and still no tabs in finder windows :( The underbelly of the finder did improve magically in the last two - three builds. Still no "live" finder but you can at least reliably force reload folder contents by reopening the folder (no that did not work before). And generally it seems a tid faster when copying and it does not lock up when there is a server missing (at least not more then 20 seconds – much better then the 10 minutes it used to under tiger).
Screensharing rocks - its solid mature and fun. Not much more to say about it. Its one of the things you ask "why not earlier" but the clean integration and the speed and the quality of the screen cast is just what you would expect nothing more nothing less and all without installing anything – I can see Apple going a "virtual desktop" route with this sooner or later, I strongly expect more on this front (true virtual desktop as they had in NeXt). I have a space with my server and my two g5 on my Powerbook and can control the whole office with just clicking "ctrl 5" which gets you to space 5 and to full c to your comps – again GREAT.
The rest is all small things scattered throughout the system. Especially the System Preferences have seen some great improvements, like better Networking features. 
An advanced tab for user management to set you home folder to somewhere different (YAY! no more netinfo mangling). Filesharing with access lists also works incredibly well and you can set sharepoints which is an appealing concept (so it does have its rough edges).
There is a LOT of things for developer, since I am not one I can not comment to detailed on them. But one thing that is great for me is that you can now use RSS in Quarz Composer files that are not Screensavers (something that was disabled in Tiger because of the fear of intrusion through that door). So you can make a Quarz Composer Composition with an RSS feed and have that play through Quicktime on a webpage.
And while I am at it: Quicktime. Its the same old f*$k s%&t under the belly – even worse I have reason to believe it has seen a serious performance decrease. If you open lots of movies (above 200) it crashes it drags down the system and generally I would hope one day Apple takes the gagantuan task to replace it with modern code - they might do just that with the QTKit but its not beeing used by QTPlayer yet it seems or they just copy and pasted code from old Quicktime to QTKit. They should just use the codebase of VLC and make Quicktime opensource and have the coder/decoders closed or something - the current state of affair is not acceptable.
BUT I do like the new overlay interface acrros the board. Very great interface desging not getting in the way and absolutely minimal but usable. Great. Same goes for the new DVD player overlay interface.
Oh and I almost forgot to mention QUICKLOOK. As with spaces it seems to be a small addition but it is one of those productivity boosts that you do not see at first but once you use it more then three times you can not let go of it. Select any type of file hit the space bar and you see a nice overview of all the files or a bigger preview of just one file (you can scroll through all of them). It previews about everything a normal user uses and is extendible via plugins to preview even more - it can go fullscreen. Next time you get a USB stick full of photos and text files and pdfs and movies (yes it playes QTMovies faster then QTPlayer ;) and whatnot you see this as the most incredible thing to save you some time looking for the right thing.
Another thing I want to talk about is Mail. The epicenter of love/hate inside me. Its been improved A LOT in my opinion. That it just "sees" dates and adresses inside a mail and lets you easily add those to the calender/adress book is just damn splendid. Overall it also seems faster and more reliable. But the new features are a bit on the slow side – especially RSS feeds. So I do love them inside mail much more then inside Safari (a hot debate I can tell you among us seeders), its just not quite there yet, but I see mails interface as the better one for managing and archiving the feeds. Notes are also great but I have not found extensive use of them. 
A very welcome addition is the new small activity monitor that you can enable in mails main window bottom left corner.
New iChat is a very nice evolution with tabs seeing the day of light (finally) but in typical apple fashion are integrated just lovingly. Conference videostreams are going to be hip especially as you can show someone you vacation video through iChat while in the conference :) iChat theater supports any fileformat that Quicklook supports btw. - on the server side. The client side does not need all the Quicklook plugins to see the content as its streamed as plain ol video.
Calender has been missed in most reviews I have seen yet it has seen a fundamental shift. First of all third party application can now seamlessly communicate with it (that was a pain under Tiger if you ever used a TimeTracking program). And the general editing a date interface has changed for the better, in general its MUCH much faster in the interface.
Other smaller improvement of note to round this up is tabs and better visual presets in Terminal. A better cleaner console.app with color/icon codes of errors and a vastly improved automator with a record function.
Overall I do not see this update as a "minor" one anymore even so it seemed like it at first. All the small improvements combined do make for a much improved experience - especially for power users (I do not see normal users benefitting THAT much). I do not have the final final build so I can not judge stability in general but I can say that it might be rough on the edges still and if you want a fluently working system wait until 10.5.3 at least.
My only wish to Apple at this point – put in the full ZFS! (oh and FTFF and the FQT).
If you have any specific questions you may ask in the comments and I try to answer them.
Oh and ONE MORE THING: Backup EVERYTHING before you install this cat it bites at times!
(this is not just a simple "backup always before you install new software" warning - this is a serious "you better back up" warning!)
Technorati Tags:
Apple, BetaTesing, OS X, Quicktime, Leopard
Last night Steffen and me thought that it would be nice to have a stroll through the neighborhood. Just because the weather was better then expected (for an Oktober night unusally warm). You know just walk down streets and talk and chill. I have done this a lot in my youth as everyone else I know in Kleinmachnow. I do not think walking on streets is anything unusual - yes it was quite late but hey not everyone goes to bed at 9 o clock and not everyone wants to sit in front of the boob TV all night.
Yet it seems walking on the street is nowadays illegal or at least subject to intense questioning and background checking - it seems walking on the street is abnormal and you must be a terrorist or something if you are not in bed by 10 oclock.
Why you might ask? Well during the 3 hours walk/bikeride we had been chased first by a blue car (definatly chasing us because the followed us a bit into a small patch of wood before stopping when we went onto a too small road to follow us with car).
We found it strange but forgot about it fast. A six pack of police in a side street didn´t see us. What it was doing there escapes us because we were litarally the only people on the street and we haven´t seen a car for on hour.
Then a bit later around the next corner the doors opened from a silver VW Passat (license plate somewhat P-A something), two dodgy looking people got out (yes you get a bit of an adrenalin rush) and stood in front of us. At this point we had been walking - pushing the bikes, so we were not even members of driving population in any way.
The older guy showed us a some kind of silver coin to identify himself as police.
Then the questioning began. Where are we going, what are we doing there, why are we not home(? why should I - there is no law prohibiting me beeing outside right? Or is there a curfew in Kleinmachnow nowaday?)
Since I never take an ID with me because you do not have too and Steffen also didn´t have any that seemed to make us suspicious. The younger guy who had strangely red small eyes took down our names and adresses and either he was born nervous as hell or had such an adrenalin rush or took some powder (I still think the latter) because he was shaking so bad when writing that I was almost laughing.
But why the fuck did I have to tell my half life story to some cops when all I did was walking down the street? Well it gets better - wait a bit.
So they made a background check and I asked the older cop a couple of questions, specifically what they are looking for. He didn´t want to say trying to get out of the question telling me that there is some bike theft going on in town - well as long as I can remember there is bike theft in this town but I was still allowed to roam my home city without beeing subjected to intense questioning - why the fuck do they need to know where I am coming from or where I am going to?!
After telling us that there is nothing against us in the police files (always good to know, these days there could be so much you have done wrong right?) they let us go.
Steffen went home right afterwards and so I too headed home. But just about 500 meter further down the doors of another car opened (I suspect this to be the car that chased us earlier as it was also a blue opel combi) and two young shaved headed people stepped outside and in my way telling me to stop. I instantly started laughing, and before they even could identify themselves I told them that I really just going home what my name is my birthday adress and that I had just been subjected to intense questioning by their peer. There eyes opened in shock that I was so offensive but they really didn´t know what to do. The one told the other to keep an eye on me while he was getting back into his car to check with the other cops. He came out of the car looking almost sad and told me I could go.
HELLOOOOOO. THIS IS A FREE COUNTRY LAST I HEARD. I do NOT want to be subjected to intense questioning JUST BECAUSE I AM WALKING DOWN A STREET A BIT LATER THEN NORMAL PEOPLE WOULD.
I mean NOT EVEN IN THE GDR has anyone EVER asked me what I am doing on the street and I lived 10 meters away from the wall!
I would say the police state is already enacted and its worse then even my paranoid self thought. Expect regular roadblocks at night by this time next year.
So if you are in Kleinmachnow at night expect to be searched, questioned and humiliated.
They should have never entered into the iPod bussiness. Even so its great for shareholder they are on the right path to become what they so long have tried to avoid becoming - another microsoft. Not only is Leopard shaping up to be the most underwhelming piece of Operating system coming out of cupertino since system 7.1 its also - if they are eying for oktober release - one of the buggiest - and there is not even that much stuff in there that new. Certainly not more then there was in Tiger. So this is sad. But not only this - there core major down to earth bussinness was selling ultra cool laptops. Well... I am waiting the 5th week now for mine - they said it would ship in 10 days (which I thought at the time was already unacceptable).
Apple - the company that once was great and is becoming more mediocre by the minute. There is nothing excellent, nothing revolutionary, nothing for the crazy ones, nothing for the odd ones anymore to get even a tiny bit excited. Its only for unexperienced the mom and dad the once who have no clue. Its sad.
What is even more sad is that unless you are a masochist there is no other choice out there. Because the choices are either configuration hell on the command line and then having a stable and secure OS or another mom and pop approach and having an unstable bloatware os. Sadly OS X is going to be unstable piece of bloatware in its next incarnation.
I hope there will be outrage and apple thinks about its core values and business sooner rather then later because they are in to loose massive user-base if Linux/UbuntuLinux becomes just a tiny bit more useful.
So there I wait until the piece of metal arrives and then I probably have to turn in for service after a month as I have done for any other powerbook I owned, just this time it will probably take 3 month until they fix it. Maybe I should cancel the order...
But yeah sure an iPhone with the capability of 15 years old computers will bring human kind forward.
With todays surveillance mania by our oh so beloved governments there is this one big argument cropping up everywhere in favor of surveillance. Its the "I have got nothing to hide" one that uninformed mom and pop spout out in repetition to propaganda mass media brainwash.
I personally usually just say "not at the moment", because what you do today might be illegal tomorrow with a neonaziconservative regime ruling earth.
But since that convinces only some smart people there is more ammunition needed.
Some of that come in a form of a PDF from Professor Daniel Solove.
My favorite is still the the "You have curtains? Yes? Well then it seems you have something to hide!"
There is also a nice slashdot thread about it.
Technorati Tags:
Politics, Surveillance, Privacy
I know this might be amusing to some so as a sunday laugh I post a photo I just found while cleaning up. It shows part of the Mr. Aschbrenners Computer class anno 1987 in deep red socialistic Kleinmachnow / East Germany. Its me sitting in the middle on a kick ass KC85/II sporting 8 KiloByte RAM, a NO SMALL CAPS rubber round keyboard, a whopping "HD ready" 320x256 pixel screen, a "save me 10 times and you have one functioning copy" cassette recorder and an operating system called CAOS (Cassette Aided Operating System) with lovely BASIC. When I remember correctly this photo appeared in some kind of newspaper at the time. I actually programmed an animation on this thing back then even so there was no direct graphic access - I hacked around it by creating a custom font set and then cycling through the typefaces... ah the old times...
On my way to good old england I witnessed a couple of things that I think are worth mentioning. Haven´t been in the country for less then a year but things seem to change radically. First off was the flight.
Boarding a plane in Berlin was actually easier then the last time I was flying. I did notice two guys wearing traditional islamic hats, beards, white robes normal pants and some Nike(heavy tm) sneakers. I also witnessed a orthodox jew black robe, black hat, black locks, black shoes. All three where about 25-30 years old. At the security check in in germany I could also witness that all three had a german passport and funnily enough all three got to board the plane without any hassle neither at the security nor at the plane nor nothing. I would even say people absolutely didn´t care about any of them. They all seemed nice easygoing fellas who did not harras or annoy anyone. Then we landed in London Gatwick. While getting ON the plane in Berlin took us about 15 minutes (including security check) there was a HUGE line in London getting OUT the airport. The EU citizens where probably waiting about 40 minutes to get through the passport check the non EU citizens line was about 10 times as long filling a huge hall. Poor people there probably waited about 3 hours to get OUT of the airport into the country of the free. Now as said the three "test" persons had german passport and luckily all three where right in front of me. While everyone got through the passport check just fine without any annoying questions something happened AFTER the passport check that I would call blatant harassment. The orthodox jew was, like everyone else, walking away towards the place where you get your luggage. The two muslims where also starting to walk in this direction but just at a point where EVERYone trying to get through the passport check (probably about 1000 people) could see them two men in black (I am not kidding) approached them showed them some identity card and took their passports away telling them to wait right on the spot and not move. Now my friends thats an embarrassing situation and if I would have been in their Nike shoes I would start to build up some serious hatred against the english government. They where traveling light had been through two passport checks and one serious security check in Berlin, where german citizens and someone from a different religion had just been walking through without a problem. That is what I call breeding terrorists and to any wanna be terrorist I would suggest dressing up as an orthodox jew because these people are never stopped or harassed at all.
But it wasn´t all that I could witness. Besides Britain having one security camera operational for every five inhabitants this country is militarizing heavily. On the way from London to Bristol I saw SIX tanks on the streets about 15 other military vehicles and eight fully armed assault helicopters. Anyone ever saying anything about east germany having been militarized needs to get a grip, at no time in my live have a seen such a military amassment in a non combat zone in one day and I grew up with the Berlin wall in eyesight.
Now I am in beautiful Devon where nature and farms rule the landscape and everything is so absolutely peacefull and quite if it weren´t for the two to three assault helicopters flying low above every day since I arrived.
Naturally with my background growing up in a suppressing communist state I am hyper aware of these things, people around here don´t seem to notice them too much. I do think that is deliberate. I do think they are training the english population slowly to accept the fact that the military rules the country and any dissent is not welcome. And they are using the evil islamic terrorist to give them an enemy that unites the english population in fear to then in return repress them.
Sadly with our current nazi loving interior minister Mr. Schäuble germany will have the same faith in the not too distant future. Free England is almost lost already I would say, this is about as much 1984 as it needs to get for the government (or megacorporation or whoever is in power) to completely suppress any dissenting voice for eternity. Its brutal and it makes me sad and feel helpless and powerless.
Technorati Tags:
terrorism, political, freedom
First and foremost: I am a very skeptical person and I am very cynical especially when it comes to today companies and their policies but what happened today shattered a small part of my world view about kapitalism in a very positive way.
A little background story: As most of you dear readers know I am doing lots of 3D animation visual FX and similar virtual pop art media work. I do this since 1992 where I started with a program called Silver3D (that then became Imagine) on an utlra fast Amiga 2000. Anyway this backstory is getting out of hand already. I love doing 3d - or at least I love what comes out in the end because it allows me to put into visual form for other people what I see inside myself (even the boring small stuff) so for me its the only way to share my inner vision. The big problem is the technical side. It consumes so much energy that I can´t just pump out stuff. Things are getting better on a grand scale in this field. Jez – I can´t keep focus. Anyway one of the coolest things that I love to do is integrate 3d into real life footage. Its lovely and puts my innerpictures right into clash with reality (and I love it). BUT for doing that you either have to take a camera on a tripod (boring) or try to recreate a real world camera move inside your computer through a process generally called "tracking" today. While there might be a third way that I will hopefully talk about soon the tracking is the state of the art thing to do. Now as easy as it sounds it is not. Its a thing that until a couple of years ago you did by hand (yes I did that by hand in a 1996 project for a local bar commercial with a flying dragon - 30 seconds handtracking 3d is something you never forget in your life as a BAD experience). Of course it was the military that developed computerized tracking guides for their missles and some Hollywood studios got to thin
