no wi-fi for you, sir
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[upset]
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it seems that although all RIT campuses have wireless connection (my computer sense it and i can almost smell it, too), i can’t get a temporary password.
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it’s like refusing a cup of water to a stranger. yeah, you can do this, but it’s gross.
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like, if you think in a technological point of view, you think about rules for this and for that. ok, procedures. but when you think politically, you have to have a reason why not to grant temporary access to visitors. is it fear of illegal use? is it because of $$$? lemme know.
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getting stuck in technologial have-nots and forget about the social implications of it is the blindness of computer users… the technical system as an end in itself…
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[/upset]
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ok, i’m an addict in forced abstinence. tho i have a point, in fact i’ll find any justification to grant me access to my piece of noosphere.

about vonage
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well, i don’t know about the actual service, i’m still only using their “softphone”, a program that permits you to make and receive calls from anywhere you have broadband connection.
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the service is kinda choppy, but i guess i’m doing something wrong, because ppl are talking wonders about it.
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i used it on hilton hotel, and it worked fine. i suppose that if the service gets popular, the wi-fi providers will start to get angry… coz it probably sucks too much band. or not.
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if i’m not available (computer off, program off, internet off, or the usual 3 rings after), the caller goes to a voice mail service, as usual and i receive a mail telling me i have a new voicemail. going on the website, i can hear (and download, think of the possibilities) the message. kinda neat.
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too bad their site is crammed with irrelevant information. i’d suggest something like:
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- a cookie to remember my login/password (kmon, write it everytime i want to hear a message is clunky)
- a link on the mail, so i could go to the message right away
- better integration with the OS (but i guess the mac version is really new). i tried to use an apple script that bridges vonage softphone with mac’s address book, but it didn’t work with me (everytime i try to call someone, it appears as if THEY are calling me. weird).
- and again with better integration, open the source for some other apps… i’d love to have a program that pops up a textfile for each person, so i could write down what i have to talk with someone, and then when they call me, i’m all prepared.

thresholds II
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I bought a powerbook 12″, with superdrive. It’s the first time I use a top of the line computer.
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It’s not that fast (i don’t mind it, I don’t buy the fast = productivity myth) but it’s very responsive.
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before it, my workload should respect the bload programs, one at a time. now, I can afford to have 2, 3 big programs open, and concentrate on each task .
usually, my chain is corel draw (design), photoshop or flash (adjustements) and dreamweaver (presentation, upload). for each step.
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and even if my computer can handle al ot of programs open, my attention span doesn’t, so the hide command (command+H) saves me (my computer doesn’t have to redraw all windows, and I don’t have to reopen the program at every turn).
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and just to be geeky, I found a code that makes the hidden program icon slightly transparent on the dock, just for fun:
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you go to terminal and type defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden -bool true, and then you restart the dock, with killall Dock.

somewhere in the middle of my chaos, i finished watching lain. the ending is very anticlimatic, but well, that was the tone since the begining. it reminded me a lot of ketamine trips, and the john lilly’s motto “the key is no key”. in fact, it was the first time i’ve heard about john lilly in more popular medias (and vanevar bush’s memex also). since then, only scattered on the web.
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digging thru orkut communities (it’s system is a helluva mess - i still coudn’t find what its architects want to convey, or if they’re just glueing old ones together - but since whoever adds & connects more users wins this game of social systems, there i am and winners they are) i found this page, comparing the computers between lain and apple.
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some other insights: vanevar bush wanted to create memex (his system of “augmentation of human intellect”, as he used to say) to help on the manhattan project. atomic bomb, information bomb, it reminded me directly paul virilio (”The information bomb is economic warfare under the pretext of freedom“). This guys gives me the creeps: he’s a luddite with the right arguments.
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and damn, the anime talks about schumann resonance, simply the natural resonance of planet earth: tap into this vibe and, well, you have a natural web. in fact, that was some of the premises of the anime, a programmer pointing a new version of a popular software thru this resonance - and thus spreading the wired outside the computer world - and the templars, trying to “reverse the damage”, treating the feature as a virus, because it was against their plans for the web to meld with the “real” world. and of course, lain in the middle of it, a wild card, trapped between the two worlds.
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the thing that struck me was that i didn’t know about it before. it means me, a collector of conspiracy theories and weird science, wasn’t aware of it. all under nikola tesla information cluster. gotta know more about the early etherites (they lost this paradigm war for the thomas edison’s crew), and it really hurts to be infected by a paradigm that can’t be used (unless you go nuts and dive into it, but no, thanks, my agenda is full).
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this netfix thing is doing good to me. now we’re watching the shoujo kakumei utena series, a mix of shoujo imagery (roses, lean guys, colorful hairs, gay romance, romantic relationships, faerie atmosphere), invisible college (a school of revolution, en of the world, constant change, metamorphosis) and a lot of psychoanalysis (all the sassy and girlie characters, when nearer the central myth, become more deep and their inner struggle, like an occasional zoom in that gives you insights of their behavior, before and after). and damn, it’s w.e.i.r.d!

when our children’s dreams come back to haunt us
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salon disscuss the restrictive copyright laws, talking about mickey mouse (y’know, disney is the company lobbying for more and more restrictions in the copyright laws, and is ironically the copmany that reused a lot of fairy tales).
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after that, watch gimme the mermaid, a crude animation by a disney employee, using the company’s computers. bonus point if actually saw “the little mermaid” (the obsession with the word of humans, the questioning about how something so beautiful could be forbidden - in the cartoon, mermaids couldn’t talk with humans).

complex information visualization
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two nice treemaps, so you can have a glimpse of… everything.
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newsmap is a flash application of the google news, you can select your map view by sections (sports, world, entertainment) and nations (currently, 10 countries there). the darker the color, the older the news.
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marketmap is the same idea, but all about bling-bling. and in java, too, slower to load. the greener, the more up, the reddish, the more down. black means steady (see, you cna predict whole industries by that).
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a brief (and insightful) explanation of treemaps can be found here. and a flash app for blogs treemaps (the bigger the square, the more comments it have), here.
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and hey, my computer is fast enough, any chance to export a quicktime/flash animation within a selected range? let’s see, i wanna know the fluctuation of technology sector from march 2002 to march 2004, 1 second a day (a 12 min movie). that’s revolution!

I think the clearest demonstrator that Microsoft has held back innovation is PowerPoint. Because it is virtually installed as default on all business machines, everyone uses it. Microsoft has had little motivation to update it, so it still functions like a piece of software from ten years ago. But ask any graphic designer about it and they will free out about how impossibly sh*t it is for creating presentations, especially bearing in mind the amazing graphics computers are capable of these days. And yet where is the strong competition for PowerPoint? There isn’t one, because it is impossible to compete with the kind of product bundling Microsoft can get away with.

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from slashdot, yep.