Stumbled across an article talking about the search for intelligent life in the universe just now. Must share this quote with you:

David Grinspoon: "If civilizations like ours were all over the galaxy, it would not be obvious. We are only listening, not broadcasting. We are not doing astroengineering. True, we are leaking sitcoms and beer commercials, but these are not easily detectable over most of the galaxy and certainly would not be interpreted as signs of true intelligence."

When I read that, I imagined two aliens having a conversation.

A1: Any signs of intelligent life out there yet?
A2: Nope. I thought I had something, but it turned out to be a false lead.
A1: What do you mean? It was just static that sounded like a transmission?
A2: No it was a transmission alright, faint but consistent. It consisted of creatures getting themselves into painful social situations through misunderstandings and escalating lies.
A1: That might signify intelligent life!
A2: I thought so too, until I saw images of a green slimy creature saying "Wazzaaaap!"
A1: Oh. That's too bad. It had some promise for sure.
A2: Yah. Back to the grind.
A1: I guess so. Hey, I'm going to grab a beer. You want one?
A2: Sure. Grab one for me while you're there.

I have been an avid science fiction reader for the last 28 years. Before that, I was more of an avid Dr Suess reader. As a child, I was so excited by the possibilities of space and space travel. I saw myself living in an asteroid, or going for a vacation to Mars.

For the last 15 years, I have become increasingly pessimistic. What little remained of the American space program seemed to either be concentrated on military applications, plagued by problems, or both. And there seemed to be little interest in getting into space anywhere else in the world.

This year is the first time in a long dark earthbound decade that I have felt my optimism stirring again. No, we still don't have hyperspace (Zefram Cochrane, where are you?), so everything is still really, really far away, but at least we're getting out and staying out. Two events in the past week have really gotten me excited:

X-Prize

The $10 million Ansari X Prize, which has been offered since 1996 by a group of private donors, will go to the first team to build a spacecraft without government help, launch three people or their weight equivalent into space and then repeat the feat with the same craft within two weeks.

Preliminary data from Edwards Air Force Base indicated SpaceShipOne had comfortably surpassed the 62-mile altitude required by contest rules.

The stubby, short-winged craft returned to its hangar with no damage and, with a change of engine, could be ready to fly again on Oct. 4, the date tentatively set for the second X Prize flight, said aircraft designer Burt Rutan.

Virgin Group founder Richard Branson announced in London this week that his Virgin Group planned to offer passenger space flights aboard rockets based on SpaceShipOne by 2007.

Mars

"Mars Global Surveyor has been productive longer than any other spacecraft ever sent to Mars, since it surpassed Viking Lander 1's longevity earlier this year and has returned more images than all past Mars missions combined," said Tom Thorpe, project manager for Mars Global Surveyor at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The mission will complete its 25,000th mapping orbit on Oct. 11.

So, this recent article on Slashdot got me thinking again about "free" software. Most of the time, I only care if the software is monetarily free. But people kept talking about software that was "free as in beer".

That phrase, "free as in beer," got me wondering. What, exactly, does that mean? So I looked it up and found this:

"The expression free as in beer refers to things which are available at no monetary cost (like free beer at a party). It can be contrasted with the expressions free as in speech or free as in freedom, which refer to something which is free of restrictions, as in the freedom of speech."

So, "free as in beer," means monetarily free? Huh? I'm afraid that's not the connotation of that phrase to me! It actually means "extremely rare, likely to get you into trouble, and likely to cause quiet resentment among your friends if you take too much and never return the favour."

I'm re-reading an old, short book I liked as a teenager, because it felt so close to my experience.

It is called "A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else" and it is by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Here is an excerpt from the book that I think captures a bit of what it is like to be a geek in high school, at least for me:

"I think what you mostly do when you find you really are alone is to panic. You rush to the opposite extreme and pack yourself into groups -- clubs, teams, societies, types. You suddenly start dressing exactly like the others. It's a way of being invisible... You have to be with it. That's a peculiar phrase, you know? With it. With what? With them. With the others. All together. Safety in numbers. I'm not me... I'm a popular kid. I'm my friends' friend... You can't see me, all you can see is us. We're safe."

"And if We see You standing alone by yourself, if you're lucky, we'll ignore you. If you're not lucky, we might throw rocks. Because we don't like people standing there ... reminding us that we're each alone and none of us is safe."

"I tried. I really did. I tried so hard it makes me sick to think about it... But none of it worked. I don't know why. Sometimes I wonder if introverts have a peculiar smell, which only extraverts are aware of."

"Some kids really don't have much Me at all. They truly are part of the Group. But a lot of them just act -- pretend -- the way I tried to. Their heart isn't really in the groups, but still they get along, they get by. I wish I could. I honestly wish I could be a good hypocrite. It doesn't hurt anybody, and it sure makes life easier. But I never could fool anybody. They knew I wasn't interested in what interested them, and they despised me for it, and I despised them for despising me."

Holy Week

The bus drivers, smoking and laughing,
Cast long shadows in the spring morning.
A bird's liquid call, from a blossomed branch,
Finds me through the sound of traffic.

conservatives and liberals and changing the world

Liberals are people who don't have much to lose the way things are, and they have much to gain if things changed.

Conservatives are people who have a lot to lose if things changed.

That's why we tend to be more liberal when we're young, and more conservative when we're older. As we age, we tend invest in the current system, and changes become more and more likely to be negative for us. More social programs will mean more taxes, and we're in a much higher tax bracket...

That's why idealists become dictators. That's why the church has corrupted so many times in the past. Contrary to many people's thinking, it's nearly impossible to change the system from within. As you accumulate wealth and power, you become the establishment, and you lose the ability to change it. Once you depend on the establishment, the establishment can hold you hostage if you fight it.

Anybody out there know some rich liberals (Let's call them Rich Young Rulers)? And if you do, does it disprove my theory? Maybe my theory could still stand; do these RYR liberals feel secure enough in their power and wealth to be "token" liberals (Like Bill Gates, who can give millions and millions away and still be the richest man in the world, or Ray Anderson, the "Green CEO" who can garner kudos for his environmentalism and still be well-paid CEO of the world's largest carpet manufacturer), or do they have something more important than money, that is, could they lose everything for the cause, and still feel they have won?

Well, I've been working at my new job as a Tech Writer for a little over a month now, and I've gotten used to the taste of my foot. It seems to be in my mouth a lot.

We had the company Christmas party last night at the local Royal Yacht Club. The food was fan-tas-tic. Five different preparations of wild salmon alone, weird things like palm hearts and lotus root, and hard-to-get stuff like fresh asparagus. Roast turkey, beef and lamb. Oysters and shrimp. Mixed strawberries and yams. Cheesecakes and warm Christmas pudding. It was a gastrinomic delight, the likes of which I have never beheld before.

And the Queen presided, royally staring down from her frame over the fireplace.

As we went to the heavily laden buffet tables, I was jokingly commenting to my new boss, in my usual "what's-an-inside-voice" tone, about how the yacht club represents the Entrenched Aristocrasy, when a guy suddenly came up beside me and said in a pleasant voice, with a half-smile on his face, "Fuck you, I'm a member."

My eyes widened -- that was not what I was expecting -- and after a few seconds of floundering, I replied, "well, revolutionaries are just jealous of the aristocrasy, you know."
"And sometimes, they win," He replied cryptically.
"Then they become the aristocrasy themselves," I said, and we arrived at the buffet, saw the food, and forgot what we had been saying ...

Even though I am a "computer guy", I don't have a digital camera, MP3 player, cell phone or PDA.

Why? Because I'm waiting (impatiently) for all of those devices to be incorporated into one device that is fully tested and debugged. No more early adoption for me, unless I get a high-paying job again.

This device should also have wi-fi and be able to play movies, both on the little built-in screen and on any s-video TV set. It should have at least 20GB of HD space.

Anybody got any other specs, or other devices they might want?

Here's another one that looks interesting. If only it had cell phone functionality...

Well, I regained moderator status over the summer, but two of my moderations were metamoderated as "Unfair" (for no reason that I could tell), so I guess I'm not going to be moderating for a while now... That's a shame. I thought I was doing a good job.

Oh well. Go away for three weeks, lose Moderator status. What else could I expect?

The good news is that I had a good time, although Europe is terribly expensive for us Canadians.

Barcelona is about Gaudi, Madrid's Prado is magnificent, and Sevilla is a great city to be in on a warm Friday night.

And then there's Granada and the jaw-dropping Alhambra, and Gibraltar's monkeys...

We also spent time in Bavaria. Mmm. Beer.

David Boyne, the writer of Quo Vadis, dude? an article I stumbled across today, has written a bunch of interesting articles, all asking probing questions.

For instance, Consume This! points out the critical difference between citizens and consumers: citizens are pains in the ass, while consumers are passive and pliable. That's why the corporate and political powers-that-be all want us to be consumers, not citizens...

And Death to America asks where are all the dead and dying people in America? "...few things in this country are cleared up and cleaned up as quickly as the carnage from our car crashes. But that only explains the dead doing a disappearing act for the 109 of us who will become road kill today. What about all those other Americans who will become dead today?" (whoo. 109 per DAY killed by cars in the US! SARS, take that!)

Live and Let Live is really the preface to Quo Vadis, and it's all about freedom... "Freedom, for many, is a burden, a crushing weight. Having to endlessly think and to act on one's thoughts, having to try and risk failing (or sometimes more intimidating: risk succeeding) is, for many, a terrible pressure. They would rather watch television."

Great reading...

A recent column of I, Cringely struck me as particularly poetic. I have slightly modified part of the article and I have inserted line breaks in strategic locations and I present the resulting "found poem" for your consideration. Please note that the bulk of the text is not mine, but Bob Cringely's.

Cluster

Now here is the part
That sticks in my mind:
If a machine fails,
The other machines simply
Take over
Its functions.

As a result, whenever
A server fails at Google

THEY DO NOTHING.
They don't replace
The broken machine.
They don't remove
The broken machine.
They don't even
Turn it off.

In an army of drones,
It isn't worth it
To locate and replace
The bad machines.

Hundreds,
Maybe thousands
Machines lie dead,
Uncounted,
Among the 10,000 plus.

We are totally dependent
On computers, yet the marginal cost
Of a computer -- at least for Google --
Is nothing.

We push crippled Navy airplanes
Off carrier decks and into the sea.

Jiddah, Saudi Arabia,
20 years ago,
Asked a Korean company
To remove the city's
80,000 abandoned cars
(the population of Jiddah
back then was 400,000).

The Koreans discovered
That many of the cars --
Some made by Mercedes
And even Rolls Royce --
Had simply run out of gas.

So, I was ego surfing and I found that an old friend of mine had published some ancient writings of mine from my C64 - 300 baud modem - BBS days, written when I was a teenager in Toronto in the 80's.

They are Cookies and Their Uses and a very useful Computer Troubleshooting Guide.

Oh, to be young again...

By some bizarre coincidence, the day that I posted that journal about listening online to Radio Paradise, the station was having technical difficulties with their ISP:

Network status: Arrrgh!! A routing problem at our service provider snafu'd the website & most of the streams for most of Thurs (4/10). There are still some problems, but they've applied a band-aid cure that should let us limp toward a permanent fix. Very sorry about the interruption.

Here's a great Arlo and Janis cartoon about the joys and headaches of listing to internet radio.

This morning RP has played Bjork, Dar Williams, U2 and the Beatles...

To whom it may concern,

Thank you for your prompt response to my previous e-mail. Unfortunately, your answer, that the service your company has provided to me for free will now become a pay service, was extremely disappointing.

I'm sorry that your company has decided to take away the only feature that made your e-mail service unique, the free e-mail forwarding.

I'm also sorry that you've given me so little time to inform all the people on my contact list that I am no longer going to be using your service.

My ISP, Telus, already gives me several perfectly serviceable e-mail addresses, all of which are accessible from a web browser as well as a POP e-mail client. Just about everyone I know is in the same situation. However, I chose your canada.com service to be my "primary" account (as did many of my friends and family) because we could forward our mail to any account for free, and we thought that our canada.com addresses would be more permanent and portable than the accounts that our ISPs gave us. I know we are not a small minority in this. As you may know, Canada has one of the highest percentages of internet-in-the-home in the western world, so a large percentage of your users also have ISP-provided accounts.

I'm sure you understand that when people use your free e-mail service, even when forwarded, you gain the large benefit of having your "canada.com" portal address as part of every e-mail sent. I'm sure many people wonder "what's canada.com?" when they receive my e-mails, and then go into their browsers to see what it is all about.

I won't start paying for this service as a matter of principle, and I guarantee you that I'm not alone. I know you will see a sharp decline in people using your service. Your company certainly doesn't need the $10/year that you're asking for, and if you do, this is not a good way to go about it. But if that is what you want, and you are willing to live with the casualties in order to increase revenue, then I wish you the best of luck.

One suggestion: why not "grandfather" all users that currently use the forwarding service? Any new users will have to pay to forward their e-mail, but "old-timers" can keep using forwarding for free.

Please forward this e-mail to someone in your company who has the power to make decisions in this area. I would really like to see a response to this e-mail from the management of the e-mail services, and so would the many people I know who are in the same situation.