The Orkut Curse

Is it not curious how some people take Orkut too seriously? Hey, this is just a botched social network. Maybe Google never will leverage it to a more efficient application. A friend of mine has said, some years ago, that Internet is not so different from real life. As to say, trolls and baddies in real life tend to be trolls and baddies in cyberspace. How ironic is Orkut environment! People who are profiling themselves as "open spirit" and "free to make new friends" don't think twice before deny a friend addition from an unknown or an indirect friend. Ok, I'm being somewhat bitter with those poor souls, even because I must accept that we live in a neotribalist world. A gang of four will be ever a gang of four, not five, six, or thousand. But is this the best way to combat the orkutsluts? I don’t think so. Six degrees of separation? I don't think so. Better say: eons of separation. This is the curse of modern times.

[Listening to: Jim White - Alabama Chrome]

My Company is Ruled by Sociopaths

In the bull's eye again, Mr. Macleod...

Resurrection

I’m feeling like a flatliner who got escaped from a near death experience. So it seems I’m a bit morbid on these comeback. My first hunch is International Necronautical Society, a group of artists who believe the death is a "type of space" that deserves to be explored by a kind of "craft" (it is, as they say, under construction). Second in the row is a game that should convey its players to a more realistic death realm. S.T.A.L.K.E.R, creation of Russians game designers, is a mixture of Andrei Ujica's "Unknown Quantity", Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 homonymous film and a bunch of monsters that seem like to have been depicted by Ralph Steadman. Death, private and public are the core of Diary of a Star, a critical blog that appropriates selections from the Andy Warhol Diaries.

[Listening to: Andrew Bird - Weather Systems]

Cantrell & Cochrane's Ginger Ale

Too much work (until July) & rereading Joyce's Ulysses. No time to blog, huh?

The Disobedientti

Receipt for spit the bushites out of your mind: first of all, recite an excerpt from Hakim Bay's CHAOS: THE BROADSHEETS OF ONTOLOGICAL ANARCHISM (could be this one: They lied to you, sold you ideas of good and evil, gave you distrust of your body and shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization and all its usurious emotions.) with Mariza's Fado Curvo in the background. After that, watch Ron Mann's documentary Dream Tower, Michael Parenti's speech "Terrorism, Globalism & Conspiracy" and read from beginning to end Lessig's Free Culture. Well, for the impatient, cut short and rewrite the history.

[Listening to: Juana Molina - Tres Cosas]

FeedBurner and Realkulture

FeedBurner, among several other things, inserts an image inside blog's feeds. Guess what is mine? Do you remember the old sci-fi TV series, The Invaders? Go figure. Some real culture gunsights for the weekend: a vast and enlightening frontline's interview with David Crosby, the only folk singer legend with guts. PDU-1, a strange and beauty "novella of the remote future" written by F. E. Potts, a founding mother who had built an outpost on the Aleut land. And, last but not least, the new book from the Mozambican writer Mia Couto, a good example of real literature.

[Listening to: Kenny Larkin - Tedra]

The Polymath Girl

Suw Charman, a Welsh girl who began her career writing for BBC Wales, is the new blog queen. Who would say that a girl living now in Dorset would arouse the attention span from high ranking fellows like Sébastien Paquet and Doc Searls? The English word for "welsh" means "foreigner" or "outsider", but Suw is not an outsider anymore. She is the new blog queen. Bonus link: Futurama Panoramas.

[Listening to: a mixing of particulate solids radio from Bratislava/Slovakia]

Sexton, Lies and Video Arts

Art is dead more than ever. Curators, artists and others scumbags ought to put a Bounty's chocolate bar above their loser's egos and wait for the worst. That's why I love Netochka Nezvanova and her iconoclast rants against the "motherfuckers" who insist in exhibit "occident kommercial refuse" in modern galleries. She is the brain who had written Nato.0+55, a software that manipulates video for live performance and installations. She has been accusing Cycling '74, a San Francisco software company, of stealing her code. Has she or not the right to despise the 21th century ennui? In fact, nobody knows if Netochka is really a real person or a group. Whatever is the true, she is my new hero and the one who could prevent me to flee to Gunkanjima. She and Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11".

[Listening to: Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter - Troubled Soul]

WordPress Micro Review

After the fresh installing of Apache/1.3.31, MySQL 4.0.20 and PHP 4.3.6 (Zend's terrific job), I finally got WordPress 1.0.2 up and running in my Red Hat 7.1, the box I fondly call of "corral". I won't make a full review here, because I want to let this job for the pros, namely Mark Pilgrim et caterva. In a few words, WordPress is a revolution in the CMS area (pun not intended) due to its feature galore and clean architecture. At a first sight, the code is a cargo cult full of fancy tricks, but with a closer look, one will note that the code is simply poetry. Post searching, categories management, links ranking, placement of GeoURL ICBM location and a truly complete options list are a few qualities to mention. Matt and his gang have rescued my faith in humanity.

[Listening to: Baldwin Brothers - Lava Lamp]

Tuvalu Pythoness

Who could imagine that the Greek Delphi priestess would transfer her temple to Tuvalu? Not exactly to the geographic South Pacific island, but an Icann domain. In ILUVU.TV, one will discover that the priestess is divining the future through television messages with amazing personal accuracy and acute vision. This makes sense, since Tuvalu domain is .tv, right? Quoting the release, it works through a combination of methodologies involving her blue-blocking wrap-around shades and the ILUVU.TV proprietary technique called Th(m)eme Mapping, which uses the remote as a tool for harnessing the meta stories inside the television set, channeling, as it were, the samples of wisdom between the TV scan lines. Don't know how it is true, but the effect is unforggetable.

Occam's API

Ole Eichhorn is asking if hell (yes, that place depicted so well by Doré) is exothermic or endothermic. Catching on Eichhorn's medieval flashback, I'd like to ask the syndication format warriors to follow Occam's razor in their yellow brick road towards a truly universal blog API. By now, I bet on Atom API. You?

[Listening to: Celso Fonseca - Bom Sinal]

Ninth Art

I've compiled a not so obvious list of future must readings. First of all, Achewood's Roomba! The Robotic Floor Vac, a series that satirizes the robotic appliance that is gaining a strange fetish momentum. Second in the row is Une Semaine De Bonte, Max Ernst's surrealistic novel - a collage recommended by the New Weird Fiction outside right, China Miéville. The last one is not a comic character, but deserves a look anyway. I'm talking about Sunflower, the black female centaur that mysteriously was wiped out from Disney's Fantasia (1940).

[Listening to: Kaija Saariaho - Chateau De L'ame: I, La Liane]

Sonic Backlash

I've installed Winamp 5. In the site, the user can read: Winamp 5 combines the best aspects of Winamp 2 and Winamp 3 into one player. Hence Winamp 2 + Winamp 3 = Winamp 5! Well, this is not true, because in the new version the stream info is not yet implemented. Hum... Winamp 3 had it. Darn! It was not supposed to be backward compatible? This sucks... UPDATE: Winamp 5 is a bloated beast. All hands on the deck for the downgrade! Ahoy!

The Newcomer

Whilst most of the blog developers are worried about money - in a rather greedy manner - the ex-b2 guys are launching WordPress, a new blog tool made under GPL. I'm gonna see how it behaves in my LAN corral.

[Listening to: Esa-Pekka Salonen - Gambit]

Negativland and Decentralization

"Bootstrap" for Douglas Engelbart and Dave Winer has different meanings. To the first, is to boost the society to successfully cope with complex and urgent problems. To the second, is stuff the trunk with groupies. Decentralization is the key word. As the time of connection passes by, dynamic IP addresses acquire the status of a true and perennial peer. Even for the eyes of BitTorrent networks and Donkey meshes. Decentralization and freedom are actually key words. Scoble has been complaining that his newsreader doesn't read Atom feeds. Why implement an auto-censor policy against yourself, my friend? Go change the newsreader! Next time better choose a decentralized one, as the cool Bloglines. Speaking of BitTorrent, I was flopped today trying watch The Mashing' of the Christ, the last Negativland prank and top-secret-not-for-viewing video. Video? Why not call it beforehand a footage frottage? Yes, because the guys had filtered the most violent movie scenes related with Christ's crucifixion, like Barabbas (1962) and, sure, Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. UPDATE 1: A new flop with Negativland's video. Seems like I don't have a MPEG-2 codec installed in my box. Thanks God, VideoHelp.com exists. UPDATE 2: Now I have seen Negativland's work craft. It was well edited. The devil baby skull morphing into Nikita Khrushchev's head is very scary, though I'd like to better know the connections between communist leaders and the martyr. UPDATE 3: Jon Udell is as much dazzled as I'm. The network is the computer. And the computer is the network. We live in interesting times! This is exactly what I meant by "decentralization". The circle is closed now. Good night.

[Listening to: Iron And Wine - Bird Stealing Bread]

The Infantile Disorder of Blogunism

Why adopt Blogger and Atom? A recent change in Blogger world speaks for itself. Concerning Atom, I have the same opinion that lead Tim Bray to promote an Atom Meeting in some Sun's quarters next month. We want them entirely free of intellectual-property encumbrances, in particular patents, said him about the new syndication format. Well, as anybody know, Dave Winer tried to register RSS in United States Patent and Trademark Office (I lost the link of Winer's filing, sorry). Radio Userland is the infantile disorder of blogunism.

[Listening to: Nikakoi - Trz2]

Sickness

When Mark Frauenfelder got the ringworm in Rarotonga, I humbly suggested him look for some advice in Dermatologic Image Database. Many days after, he helped me too. Indirectly, I mean. How? He put out a post in Mad Professor about Zicam, a new medicine, or better say, a method for refrain the cold virus action in the turbinates of the nose. Inspired by that, I made a little adaptation, covering the Q-Tip head with propolis. Believe it or not, that worked for me like a charm, even facing the situation of having to live together with two sick co-workers. I didn't end up like Jeremy Zawodny and have gained a better resistance and willingness to read Tim Bray's article about Jython.

[Listening to: Yvette In English - David Crosby - Thousand Roads (05:55)]

Shaken, But Not Stirred

James Bond likes his Blue Martini shaken, but not stirred. Or did M16's Boy Scout wanted mean something completely unlike? I really don't know. I'd like to know a lot of things. How to make a screen scraping of KEXP's play lists directly to Audioscrobbler's log list, for instance. Preferably with Eclipse IDE. I know, though, that Sofia's gypsies are tourch. And well humoured. At the same time.

[Listening to: Jony Iliev & Band - Gaida Cocek - KEXP]

LW&C

Who wouldn't like to see it?

[Listening to: CAT BLUES - Yoko Kanno - COWBOY BEBOP (02:37)]

From the ocean depths...

Maciej Ceglowski tells how Poland reacted to the new European Union recent add-ons. In an opposite direction, Jeremy Zawodny and Nelson Minar, both enthusiastically, have found a precious book in the form of a Vintage Polish erotica flash animation.

[Listening to: Secret Agent - DJ Shadow - Changeling]