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worst name EVER! by Betatester.
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I dunno about the water, but the plastic bottle for sure is eternal.
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dumbasses!

here at my work I’m forced to use outlook, even if on a mac. below my list of things I hate and love on it, compared with mac mail:

Things I hate in outlook:

• No bridge with address book app, it has it’s own contact book (like all microsoft apps, it doesn’t play well with others).
• the damned search only covers metadata (to, from, subject and two proprietary microsoft formats), it doesn’t scan the body of the email. just this flaw reduces my productivity in half. (searching who said what and when, for example)

Things I love in outlook:

• right preview pane, makes the layout how it should be: group, subgroup (titles), message.
• write a message, command+enter and a reassuring swoosh tells you the message was sent.

a lot of emotions I want to share, but I’m not very good with english language. but music is universal, huh? so I decided to share some of the songs I’m most into, five at a time.
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click on the banner below, and you can listen to it. courtesy of soundblox (which I used in zona visser, another project of mine)

800.03, Gab.Gato

this song is so obscure I don’t even have it’s actual name… just 800.03.mp3, and that’s it.
how I feel: a cyborg rechecking its peripherals before a procedure. a subroutine. grey, cold, and monotone. detached and snobby.
also check: the “automatuch”, or something like that. the different voices for different subroutines.
grab it: there’s no way iTMS has it (even google shows meager pages about). and since some other sites offer the mp3, you can download from me too. (control-click on windows, alt-click on a mac)

Aéro Dynamik, Kraftwerk

how I feel: in a happy airport. optimistic. it’s a mantra, you know.
also check: the starry bleeps. the chorus, sinalizing the way.
grab it: iTMS has it, fellas. buy it there, and deDRM it later with jhymn.

In The Future With Machines, FPU

how I feel: a good song for a drag queen to perform. vfull of drama.
also check: the egiptian bg. the lyrics, in fact.
grab it: no digital store around, but cds, still. sorry, folks

Konpyuta, Plastique de Réve

how I feel: archeologists find an ancient document detailing the purposes of computers. historic revisionism, reifying the digital experience. technognosis.
also check: the german/japanese voice. the attention to spell kon-pyu-ta right. like if the desitiny of mankind depends on it.
grab it: nowhere around, so grab it from me. (control-click on windows, alt-click on a mac)

Scorpio, The Fever

how I feel: powerful, but headed to a fall. doomed. scorpio people are short-sighted, you know. feel like placing a bet you can’t cover. pokerface all around.
also check: egyptian bg also. guitars, a thing I don’t usually like, but worked right on it.
grab it: on iTMS. (did I say about jhymn already?)

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my mourning technique has been frantically visiting forums to read their opinions about the reelection… some quotes below (and above).
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Dan Gillmor’s eJournal: “The latest word on climate change is that with the uncovering of sequestered carbon in the arctic by melting ice sheets, the rate of climate change will increase, not decrease. There’s a positive feedback loop in place now, and it will take even more to counteract it. Without added forests, greenbelts, and estuaries, there won’t be adequate photosynthetic activity to counteract the increased burning of fossil fuels. We could see 20 foot rises in ocean level in 50 years. Dan could be going to his office in San Jose by boat.

Ask yourself this: Why has the Bush administration fired scientists who won’t write biased papers to support the administrations pro-industry agenda? Why have lobbyists for energy and chemical companies been put in charge of our environmental protection, our public lands, especially our parks and precious remaining wilderness areas?

A: The large corporations, who owe no aliegance to any particular people of the world, are perfectly willing to corrupt the political system to boost their short-term profits, with no regard for our long-term welfare. You don’t have to work for any multi-national corporation for very long to see how that happens.

Perhaps the religeous right foolishly believe that god will take their faithful to heaven in the next four years, leaving the rest of us rot in a planet increasingly like Venus. It appears that their blissful ignorance, their reliance on one ancient book as the source of all truth, has made them sheep, lead by myopic executives with only quarterly profits in mind. They’ve blissfully carried us closer to our own destruction.

What we really need in technology policy is the principle that no costs be externalized. Companies and individuals must be responsible for the polution they create, the resources they extract, the health risks they cause. Tech policy should be based on true capitalism where products and services actually have to include the costs to the commons, not government subsidies to extractive and environmentally exploitive industries.”

“Where did this backup copy thing come from? A digital thing lasts forever.”
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engadget interviews jack valenti, the president of MPAA. I’ve seen the same silly ideas from some CEOs I worked with. a mix of wonder and fear of the “technology”. after an idiot analogy and clueless statements (like the title, above), i had to reply.
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ok, I tried to listen to him with open mind, but the faulty analogies (they really want to sell ideas as products, right?), just pisses me off.
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“A digital thing lasts forever”. thing? what thing? the “thing” with digital is that we finally separated the content from its representation (the vessel, so to speak). the digital is always experienced by some vessel, but it can jump around to new vessels, and that’s what makes it last forever. the name of this game is SHARING (if it’s for others) and BACKING UP (if it’s for yourself).
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i mean, it only lasts forever if you BACKUP YOUR STUFF constantly. otherwise, it will just die away with the media. and guess what, our media are fragile, real fragile. any oxidation, or magnectic pulse can destroy it. if we don’t share or backup (same technique here, remember) it just inherits the physical properties of its vessel, and dies away.
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sharing and backing up digital data is precisely the only way to keep it eternal. and that’s what we’re doing.
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please, don’t patronize me with this talk. either he doesn’t get it, or he thinks he can dupe us with silly words.

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and remembering that those guys have more power to shape our laws than our elected politicians… democracy my ass, we’re already living in a corporate plutocracy.

still MEA, RIT’s cary graphic arts collection
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as a relief, and because RIT is all commited to printing technologies (just to give you a hint, they’re sponsored by eastman kodak company), i went to see the cary graphic collection…
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the curator, a guy with a rosetta stone tie (and if you know about linguistic’s history, you understand the devotion ppl have with this rock), showed us:
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- some medieval pre-gutemberg manuscripts, totally different punctuation, with animal parchment (
- some post-gutemberg printing… the funny thing is, they tried to reproduce the more they could the old technology (manuscript), but then pagination and other metadata started to surface (indexing, lead, diagrams, and all the stuff we can find on newspapers nowadays). probably the printer guys were dying to experiment with the technology, but the clients wanted the classic stuff… i can relate to that!
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- and an original gutemberg bible page… the peak of it… i kept admiring the page, entranced by the aura of it. funny, coz printing press was precisely the tool that spawned the age of simulacra we live now, so destroying the very concept of “aura” in arts.
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i understand that as it’s hard for a fish to understand the concept of water, it’s difficult for our generation to understand the concept of no-reproduction, so if you are too entrenched in our ouw age and can’t get all the raving about the printing press, read “art in the age of mechanical reproduction” to get a glimpse of the revolution it was. or, if you have time, read all “gutemberg galaxy” (i recommend to smoke a joint before, mc luhan works better this way :).

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.