Month: November 2000

A weblog I’ve been visiting a lot lately is Adam Curry’s site. To be honest, I always thought he was incredibly annoying on MTV, but his ideas about the future of the Internet and computing are almost identical with mine — his essay on a Last Yard-style server is exactly what I’ve been slowly moving to on my LAN at home.

Anyway, Curry recently mentioned sitting down with the Dutch prime minister to discuss some web-related issues. Curry writes,

Let me tell you, nothing more fun than explaining weblogs to the prime minister, who only one year ago was ridiculed publicly when caught on tape trying to move a mouse across the screen. Yes, literally move it accross the screen.

I saw something like this happen at the first job I had out of college. I was hired by a medical laundry facility that had just bought a computerized inventory system and needed someone to implement the system and train users in the many hospitals they serviced.

Anyway, the boss was always asking me to help him solve other computer related problems, and one day he buzzed me in my office saying there was something seriously wrong with the new Excel for Windows software that I’d installed earlier in the day on his computer. It wouldn’t let him select cells he said. So I meander over to his office and the problem is that he literally could not “click” the mouse. He sort of did this stabbing motion at the butotn where he held his hand a few inches above the mouse and quickly depressed the button like he was playing a video game. He quickly went back to his Lotus software running under DOS.

On the other hand, the man had a knack with people that I’ve never seen before or since. I used to have to travel all over the state with him to visit hospitals and he sped like crazy — and got pulled over by police regularly. But he never got a ticket. One time I swear he was pulling a Jedi mind trick on this one cop when he got off with just a warning after being clocked at 20 over the speed limit. And he knew it — he wasn’t cocky, but when he got pulled over he had this aura about him that it was simply inconceivable that he could be ticketed.

The Standard recently had an article about software and online services that let people create their own radio stations over the Internet — in this case software like IceCast and services like Shoutcast and Live365.Com that stream MP3.

Shoutcast didn’t do much for me, but I was impressed by Live365.Com (though I have to wonder if either service will find much in the way of profits.) Now if there were an equivalent for video streaming available. Most of the comparable services I know of, such as FreeSpeech.Org use RealServer for video and audio.

A bizarre tidbit in The Standard story is that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act makes it illegal to post playlists in advance of a radio broadcast. That doesn’t effect me much because I’m not interested in broadcasting music, but that’s a pretty pointless restriction. There seem to me so many ways to get an illegal copy of any given recording that something like the inability to see advance playlists isn’t going to put much of a dent in the problem. Meanwhile, it hurts legitimate users — for example, if I knew when the station I’m listening to was going to be playing a boy band I could quickly switch to another channel (in fact I could script the change to occur automatically for specific bands and/or songs).

Forgot to mention the BBC also has a report on a Spanish scientist using advanced mirroring technology to potentially give people perfect vision. There have been a number of other innovations recently in vision improvement, including a report a few months ago about a new diagnostic system that is able to detect problems within the eye ball that interfere with vision that were largely unknown to medical researchers before.

The other day I was having a conversation with a fellow computer geek about the amazing pace of change in computer power, and he agreed but added somewhat dejectedly, “I wish medical science could keep up.”

I hold the opposite view — in many ways, medical science is accelerating far faster than computers (and in large part by piggybacking onto the computer revolution). Anyone who doubts this need only compare survival rates for premature infants in the United States — infants who in the 1970s would have had literally no chance at survival today routinely survive and go on to live productive lives.

Or consider this BBC report of bionic hands designed for toddlers. Who would have thought bionic arms and legs would ever be anything but a plot line for a bad ’70s television show?

One of the incredible things about the last 30 years is how quickly ideas have gone from speculative fiction to marketed product. Previous generations have had to live with the fact that human beings don’t live in floating cities or drive rocket cars, but those of us born in the late 1960s and early 1970s keep waking up to find that what was once reserved for comic books, television shows, and science fiction stories can now be bought at Best Buy.

Not that everything has or will make it, although I’m still hoping to be able to expose myself to enough gamma radiation to tell people “Don’t make me angry, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” and be able to back it up. Barring that I’ll settle for bionic arms that can bend steel bars. Come on, it could happen!

Salon’s Minna Proctor is not impressed with Maurizio Viroli’s new biography of Niccolo Machiavelli, Niccolo’s Smile. Like most people who comment on Machiavelli, the only work of his Machiavelli’s that Proctor mentions is The Prince.

An excellent revisionist look at Machiavelli is Sebastian De Graza’s Machiavelli in Hell which does a very good job of placing The Prince in its proper context within Machiavelli’s larger view of political philosophy.

No, Machiavelli doesn’t emerge as anything like a classical liberal, but at the same time he was neither a moral relativist nor a simple apologist for state-sponsored violence.

This Thanksgiving, Adbusters is once again touting its Buy Nothing Day. Instead, why don’t we all get together and have a Protest Nothing Day.

Okay, I’m stealing the idea from PCU which hilariously chronicles life on today’s campuses and ends with students gathering with signs and chanting “We’re not gonna protest,” but it’s still a good idea.

Somebody else will have to lead the protest, though — I’ll be shopping thank you very much.