"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

Outlandish Josh

Published on Tue, 2005-09-13 22:50

Strange Things Are Afoot

And not just at the Circle-K...

I just got the strangest comment-spam yet. What usually happens is some bot crawls through your site and puts up a bunch of links to online poker, pharmaceutacles or (rarely, actually) porn. Sometimes they contain some weird randomly-generated text that can be oddly intelligent.

But this one was little droplets of floridly phrased philosophy. It wasn't randomly generated, more like randomly chosen from a deck. They all point back to this site, which as far as I can ascertain is some kind of art. This page leads (via a clever url-based hack on Sony's website) to this bit of fun, which is also art or prank and is of further interest.

Diving into WHOIS records for the latter I stumble on a name (there was no name on the first site) and uncover this post from my friend Sam Tressler is the first result on google. Which is weird. I owe him a phone call.

What's going on here? "Dickgenthechev's web-templates gambling advice," is clearly art, but the owner of the domain seems to have been a serious gambling operator. Is this spam alerting us to art-hacking? I don't know. Strange things are afoot on these here internets.

I've been feeling interestingly fluid in the past week I've been here. Decompression I think they call it. I'm enjoying the room to spread out, to live spaciously, to masturbate when I feel like it. It's an important American freedom, and one we'll surrender shortly after our right to bare arms. First they come for your sleeveless shirts, then they want you to quit jerking off. Two openings on the supreme court, people! It could happen.

Actually my evening was deeply thrown off course earlier when I caught some of the Hollywood shows that are on in the same timeslot as the Simpsons in syndication. That network dead zone between the news and prime time where the televised equivalents of People, US, In-Touch and the like do their trade.

Oh my god who watches those shows! Sycophantic emptyheaded worshipping of B-list celebrities combined with a kind of spectacular moralizing. There was one bit about how a current contestant on The Apprentice was formerly a stripper who's #1 client had been comitting murder to pay for the exotic dancing. It was covered on "Inside Edition" at the time, with a trashy yet by modern standards quite earnest effort to actually capture the strange moral dimensions of the situation. The contemporary piece tried to play this with an air of scandal, that a person with such a checkered past would be allowed on The Apprentice. The producers said, quote, that they "felt she had paid her debt." Whether that's for trying to transcend her social position as a stripper or for having a murderer as a client is unclear.

After that there was a bit about nominated Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts' son, who's 4, and apparently misbehaved on live TV during Bush's announcement of his nomination. The story is he's back, but he's been on much better behavior at this week's Senate hearings -- now apparently rascally cute, which you didn't quite get before. Roberts being a conservative darling and staunch Catholic, I imagine this caused some embarassment 'specially for the missus.

Finally there was a raft of random teasers about Donny Osmond's near death experience, the baby Angelina saved, a look inside the life of some grey-haired good-looking rich guy (mogul of some sort I'll assume) with younger/blonder special lady... it all gave me the fear, quite frankly. So I took a bike ride to clear my head. It sort of worked.

It's strange. I feel more uncomfortability and fear biking the quiet streets of Eugene than I do cruising through supposedly "bad" neighborhoods in Brooklyn. I think it's a matter of not really knowing the lay of the land. Even though I grew up here, the topography is somewhat unfamiliar. I don't quite know what the deal is.

And that pretty much sums up my general state. The guy I told you to vote for in New York got trounced. Scored under 20,000 votes. Hopefully a learning experience for those involved. In the mean time, I'm hosting a meeting in a chat room called #revolution. What the fuck. The internet's a weird place. Today I met this guy, who just decided to go there from SF and be the media. I gather he does this thing kind of often. Hell, it works out all right.

The human power people are there now when the need is greatest, and that's cool, but they'll be run off when the rezoning orders grind on through just like the remaining population. Ain't gonna be the Big Easy like before. They'll save the tourist parts, but the rest of it gon' change. It was going that way anyhow, you know. But now it's drastic. Bloody. The Diaspora of New Orleans has begun. Hallelujah.

Read More

Tags: 
KoneZone
Published on Tue, 2005-09-13 16:48

/join #revolution

Hey nerds, let's have a meeting about the revolution. Back in the day when I first started taking this shit seriously we had some. It worked out pretty well, all things considered. Let's do it again.

Thursday, September 15th
5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern - 1 hour timebox
#revolution - freenode
(here's the upcoming.org node too)

That's in IRC for any non-nerds out there. Feel free to join in or listen. The conversation won't be highly technical, just a lot of people with tech in their blood doing the typing. This sort of meeting tends to piss off real organizers because it's so damn slow, but I've found the low-impact nature of a chatroom meeting to be conductive to thought. It helps if you know how to type.

The hand system will be in effect. Anyone know where the bot is that handles this? Help and feedback is nice.

This Is My Agenda -- What's Yours?
A lot of people are getting really busy as the things we dreamed up in the past few years are assimilated into the establishment. There's a lot of work around, and that's good. Time was this whole thing was all-volunteer. But as the sphere of people who we came up with become professionalized, maybe it's smart to keep our own council and our own heads.

What I'd like to try and do is:

1) Keep an evolving community of developers connected on extra-professional levels. It shouldn't just be about the work, and we need to make sure that as we begin working for different (and in many cases competing) groups, we don't fragment.

2) Get some opinions from the group on what the big picture issues are, and what the big picture ideas are that motivate us. Perhaps develop some consensus here. An ethic and some goals would be nice.

3) Pick some further actions to take. Some projects we drive rather than just assist on. Things that are really ours. Things that are risky, that only an informal group can pull off.

We've spent a good amount of time developing and deploying tools based on what our clients want. That's good. Responding to the market is necessary to produce widely usable products. But we shouldn't count ourselves out in terms of trying to influence things, in terms of guiding the course of progress. That's what players do, and we want to be players, don't we?

I mean, come on. The Boomers have been looking to our generation to program the damn VCR since we were 5 years old. We've got to take some initiative and show them the way.

But we've got to think big. The structural change is on and the Big D is in the mail. Truckers love wifi, and the rest of the country will soon be as (un)wired as NYC or San Fran. Opportunity is knocking. Let's get ready.

/join #revolution

Read More

Tags: 
revolution
Published on Tue, 2005-09-13 16:48

/join #revolution

Hey nerds, let's have a meeting about the revolution. Back in the day when I first started taking this shit seriously we had some. It worked out pretty well, all things considered. Let's do it again.

Thursday, September 15th
5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern - 1 hour timebox
#revolution - freenode
(here's the upcoming.org node too)

That's in IRC for any non-nerds out there. Feel free to join in or listen. The conversation won't be highly technical, just a lot of people with tech in their blood doing the typing. This sort of meeting tends to piss off real organizers because it's so damn slow, but I've found the low-impact nature of a chatroom meeting to be conductive to thought. It helps if you know how to type.

The hand system will be in effect. Anyone know where the bot is that handles this? Help and feedback is nice.

This Is My Agenda -- What's Yours?
A lot of people are getting really busy as the things we dreamed up in the past few years are assimilated into the establishment. There's a lot of work around, and that's good. Time was this whole thing was all-volunteer. But as the sphere of people who we came up with become professionalized, maybe it's smart to keep our own council and our own heads.

What I'd like to try and do is:

1) Keep an evolving community of developers connected on extra-professional levels. It shouldn't just be about the work, and we need to make sure that as we begin working for different (and in many cases competing) groups, we don't fragment.

2) Get some opinions from the group on what the big picture issues are, and what the big picture ideas are that motivate us. Perhaps develop some consensus here. An ethic and some goals would be nice.

3) Pick some further actions to take. Some projects we drive rather than just assist on. Things that are really ours. Things that are risky, that only an informal group can pull off.

We've spent a good amount of time developing and deploying tools based on what our clients want. That's good. Responding to the market is necessary to produce widely usable products. But we shouldn't count ourselves out in terms of trying to influence things, in terms of guiding the course of progress. That's what players do, and we want to be players, don't we?

I mean, come on. The Boomers have been looking to our generation to program the damn VCR since we were 5 years old. We've got to take some initiative and show them the way.

But we've got to think big. The structural change is on and the Big D is in the mail. Truckers love wifi, and the rest of the country will soon be as (un)wired as NYC or San Fran. Opportunity is knocking. Let's get ready.

/join #revolution

Read More

Tags: 
revolution
Published on Tue, 2005-09-13 10:48

Astrodome Radio Station Hassle

I picked this up off DownhillBattle. Some people were taking the totally smart step of setting up a low-power radio station at the Huston Astrodome where thousands of people who fled the Gulf Coast ended up. It's the right idea, but it's being blocked by local administrator, and apparently for the most ugly of reasons.

Wired News: Astrodome Radio Station Blocked

Support poured in from wireless nonprofits like the Prometheus Radio Project. All levels of government seemed excited by the idea, including Houston's Mayor Bill White, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and federal agencies like the FCC and FEMA.

But late Sunday evening, the troubles began. According to KAMP, Rita Obey, a local official from Harris County Public Health Services, gave them a laundry list of prerequisites. The most notable of these was the command to procure 10,000 personal, battery-powered radios -- and batteries.

"She said she was afraid of 'people fighting over the radios,'" said Liz Surley, a KAMP volunteer. "She made us promise not to play any rap music, because she thought it might incite some of the evacuees to violence."

This is fucking outrageous. After more hoop-jumping -- to the point of the volunteers bringing in their own fucking batteries to power the transmitter when they were told that the Astrodome (the fucking Astrodome) couldn't supply the power -- the this Obey woman still blocked the project. She "did not see the utility" for a radio station when the Joint Information Center (aka the people in charge; aka whitey -- ooh, did I say that out loud?) can use the stadium loudspeaker system to communicate with the people.

Just to be clear, it's apparent that the local Hefes don't see the need to provide the displaced community with its own means of communicating with itself. They believe that because they can squawk at them with the PA system, the community's needs for information have been met. I hope I'm projecting the racial bias, but I think there's a good chance I'm not. Sounds a lot like "keep that Jungle Music off the air, and for god's sake don't let them start doing their own news." I'm disgusted.

Anyway, there's a semi-happy ending here. They're set up to broadcast from the parking lot. And running Drupal. That's a happy thing. I'll send an email to see if they need any website help.

Read More

Tags: 
politics

Authentic Experience

more

Nerding Out

more