Category Archives: Internet

Without broadband

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Computers, computers everywhere, but not a drop of broadband! Or rather, drop may be what it did.

One of the things I first thought about when the house was sold, was broadband access. I had fiber-optic high-speed access. Kind of overkill, but the price was only marginally higher than the slower telephone  cable broadband, except for an initial investment of around $1000, which I found acceptable given that I was renting the place for five years. That cost would happen again if I chose the same solution (it covers stretching fiber-optic cable to the house, while virtually every house older than 10 years has copper cable already).  I can’t keep stretching optical fibers from house to house every year.

So I looked at DSL suppliers, and decided to go back to NextGenTel (a Scandinavian-only ISP), which I had used for several years until I moved to Riverview. The other realistic supplier was the former state monopoly Telenor, which I used before switching to NextGenTel.

I quit Telenor because of their incompetence. On several occasions I was without Internet connection for a week or two, and calling them just resulted in their helpdesk making up some random story to explain, a story which would depend entirely on who I met when I called. The next day someone else would give another story. An engineer would be there tomorrow. No, it was just a temporary glitch. No, they would get an engineer to look at it. Etc, until I happened on one of the few people who actually knew anything, and who could throw a switch to get my Internet back on.

In all fairness, Telenor is OK as long as everything works. I have them for my mobile phone, at least for the time being.

I ordered DSL from NextGenTel when I was sure I was actually going to move to Mandal. To be honest, I did look for houses in the countryside for a while. If my foot had been OK, I might even have gone for the one that was a 45 minute walk from the bus. (Once the move was imminent, my foot started healing rapidly. Another suspicious coincidence.)

Yesterday I got mail from NextGenTel that they would deliver my broadband on September 20th. That is a bit later than the 2-3 weeks their web site advertises and that is specifically mentioned during summer.  Evidently they had forgotten that their workers have summer vacation or something. I called their customer service which verified the mail. They also pointed out that this was the same for the competition, and I am pretty sure it is. For certain values of competition.

I could get ICE.NET wireless broadband in a couple days, and this is probably true because 1) I have had them before and they delivered fast, they just were horribly slow to stop when I tried to end my subscription, and 2) there is no local driving involved, they just send a wireless modem in the mail. Actually I still have their wireless modem and am testing it right now.

Or I could just continue to use my mobile phone as wireless broadband. It does have a flat rate subscription, and unless they have changed policies without me noticing, the only result of “overdraft” is that the download speed is lowered. I am not absolutely sure of this though, and it would be pretty dramatic for someone in the zeroth world to lose data access on the mobile phone!

About that: I whined on Google+ about the 10 week delivery time on broadband, and was met with absolute icy silence instead of the expected shock and outrage over the cruel and unusual treatment. Could it possibly be that this kind of customer “service” is common down in the first world? Do you still have regional monopolies and stuff? Up here in the zeroth world, every day without broadband is like a day in the Dark Ages. It is just unnatural for a modern human to not be able to videoconference, watch movies almost immediately, and play elaborate multiplayer online games while talking on some kind of IP phone. The death of distance is more or less a part of history for us, which is why being without broadband is so unthinkable.

I may end up getting the ICE.NET wireless broadband to supplement the mobile phone. Between them they should provide me with all the bandwidth I may need during July, August and Septembet. There is as usual a 12 month minimum duration, but the first six months are half price, which is quite reasonable indeed. If that applies also for former customers, I may opt for it.

At least if I have to move again (or find a nice house way out in the countryside), ICE.NET uses a frequency that covers a much larger area per base station than mobile phones, so there is hardly any habitable place in Scandinavia that is not covered. I can bring it with me anywhere there is some source of electricity, basically, with no downtime. That may turn out to be a valuable trait if I keep getting chased from place to place with little time to prepare.

I mean, it is not like you folks want to be without my updates even for a day, right?  Right?

Google+ +1

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Privacy issues is the most cited reason why people move from Facebook to Google+.  Me, I’ll probably be both places until all my friends are on Google+.

As a long-time fan of Google (I wrote about them when they were just a research project), I applied for my Google+ account about a day after the news broke. I got a couple invites from early adopters, including one old friend now working at Google, but it still took until yesterday late afternoon before I got in. Ironically, I first got through on my mobile phone.

If none of this makes sense, “Google+” is the name of Google’s new social network. Google actually had a couple of these before, Orkut being popular in some non-English-speaking countries, and Buzz being popular mostly with rabid Google fans and the extremely social. (Needless to say, I was on, but  squarely in the first category, so it was mainly used as en echo of my Twitter and Blogger accounts.) I would never join a social network whose name reminded me of workout.

Google+ has been so hyped in media lately, I really expect you all to have heard about it.  The question asked in mainstream media is: “Is Google+ the Facebook killer?”

I don’t think it is a Facebook killer, simply because  Facebook has ruled the roost for so long, it has picked up virtually all the people who don’t really care, and just joined because everyone was there already. They are not going to leave unless Google buys Farmville.  So Facebook will probably continue to exist for the foreseeable future.

The question nobody asks yet is: “Is Facebook the Google+ killer?”  The answer to this is clear: It is not. Only Google can be the Google+ killer, and with the current popularity they would get a lot of badwill if they shut it down. If they commit some atrocious privacy blunder, like reversing the visibility of entries or something, they may yet lose. Otherwise not.

Google+ is simply superior. It caters to the people who actually care, the people who join a social network to stay in touch with people they actually know (or, in some cases, wish they knew). In Google+, you don’t have just a gray mass of friends all being created equal. You have circles of friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, alumni, in-laws, ex-laws, and people you met during your vacation. Well, actually only the first three of these were predefined, but you can create a new circle simply by giving it a name and dropping someone into it.

Whenever you post something, Google+ has a line under the post showing which circles you are posting to at the moment. If some of these are not on Google+ yet, it also offers to mail them your update instead. If you see some circles that you would not want to read your post, you just x them out. If a circle is missing, you add it. There is of course also an option to post it to all your circles simultaneously. Or for the more bold, extended circles, which is the circles of your circles. In other words, friends of friends. Or you could pull out all stops and make it public, so that anyone in the world who googles for your name may at some point in time find it. Kind of like I have done here since 1998, you know. I’m still alive, but then again I have not insulted the Prophet (peace be upon him) and have no intention to start now.

In addition to total control of who sees your post in the first place, you can also regulate who gets to repost it on Google+. Obviously you cannot stop people from using cut and paste, but in that case the trace ends with them, and it is up to them to prove they didn’t just make it up (or photoshop it, in more extreme cases). Or so say the wise: I have not tested or even looked for this feature. It is not really made for someone whose white boxers have been on the Internet for years.

If you go in the other direction, extreme attention-seeking, you can also add a notify request. Normally people are only notified when you add them, but you may want to have Google send them a notify mail if you have to break an appointment, for instance, or if someone in your family dies, I guess.

Google+ comes with two types of chat, three if you count the mobile “huddle”. One is an ordinary text chat, which I am not sure whether now also supports video. Quite possibly, but I only have video camera on my job machine, and it is extremely secret.

The other type is a group video “hangout”, in which a person starts a video chat alone and Google+ broadcasts to whatever circles he allows that he is hanging out. Up to ten people can stop by and chat at the same time, like a video conference.  (Not sure how common those are in the first world, here in the zeroth world they have become pretty ordinary.) They can also watch YouTube together. Hey, I know some Happy Science promotional YouTube clips if you insist. Seriously, I don’t see myself ever using Hangout. It sounds about as much fun as Hangnails.

The mobile client is currently only for Android, but the iPhone client is supposedly waiting for Apple to allow it on their market.  The Android client has a clean, simple interface (as has the web version, of course; it is Google.) It has two features of its own: Huddle, and direct photo upload.

Huddle is another type of group chat. It has been compared to group texting, but seems to use the Internet rather than the SMS protocol so presumably is free if you are in a wifi zone or have a flat rate plan. I haven’t tested. It is probably less useful than the marketing implies, unless it somehow has the power to make your friends’ mobile phones ring. Or people get into the habit of staring at their Google+ mobile application when they don’t do anything else. Seeing how I always do something else, I am probably not in the target group.

Direct photo upload is probably the easiest to misunderstand, but luckily it is actually better than it sounds. When in the Photo part of the mobile app, you can watch your own and your friends’ photo albums, but there is a small camera icon at the top. Using it brings up a standard mobile camera screen (I suppose all smartphones have camera these days) and you just snap a picture as usual. But instead of saving on your phone’s SD card, it uploads it to a private photo album in the Google cloud of servers. From there, it is up to you to share it with your friends or just look at it at night before going to sleep. Whatever. It is like a huge memory card in the sky, basically, which you can access from wherever you can sign in to Google+.

Google+ also has a news stream, Sparks, which brings up the latest on whatever topics you have marked as your interest. (For instance Meditation,  Kindle books.) It is really just a persistent Google search which you don’t need to retype every day. The reason why it is grouped with the social software is probably that you can share it with your circles easily. Or perhaps Google just likes to search for things.

What is conspicuously missing yet is simpleminded games, but comments in the code imply that games can be added easily. I wonder if it will be possible to turn off incoming game requests. Possibly, since this is something people hate about Facebook.  I don’t notice it much, since very few of my friends are of the type that play Facebook games. But I understand some people get reams of purely game-related message on their FB page.

Anyway, it is pretty much as expected. I like it. +1

Waiting for Google+

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“Don’t mix 2D and 3D!” That’s how it used to be, but with Google+ the so-called Real Life is invading cyberspace, for better and for worse.

It is all over the news, at least the kind of news I read. Google’s new social media will finally challenge Facebook on its home turf. Or rather, Google intends to extend its home turf over to where Facebook is now. Naturally I have requested invites wherever I can, using any tricks I can find, but I’m not getting in.

This may be a good thing, actually, since I may be one of the few humans which the Google+ system does not work well for.

The basic philosophy of Google+ is that we don’t have a big mass of contacts that are all simply “friends”. Rather, we naturally relate differently to people we know, depending on where we know them from. We have something in common with coworkers, but something entirely different in common with relatives. Chances are that the two groups don’t overlap much. While there are some things we want both of these groups to know, there are some we reserve for one of them. Then there are groups connected by a shared hobby, or religious activities, or shared education, neighbors, former neighbors, or interesting people we just stumbled upon on the Net. Parents – or at least mothers – keep tabs on the families of their children’s friends. Over the course of a generation, this can rise to epic proportions, with some otherwise mentally normal people having 4000 contacts in total.

Obviously for those who are not monks or something similar, there is a great boon in sorting these people into groups from the very start. It makes the crowd manageable. It makes it easy to get the right message to the right people. And you can still send important messages to all of them at once. Such as the death of your Significant Other, or the lolcat videos that are a must see. Things like that.

Me, I differ from neurotypicals in two  important aspects here: One, I have very few friends. I don’t easily get to know people, as I generally don’t contact people unless I have some important message that only I can give them. If you know me and are not part of my birth family, you probably contacted me somewhere. I don’t mind that at all, of course. I just don’t do it unto others.

Second difference: I like to learn viewpoints that I don’t necessarily agree with. It is easy for me to hold in my mind quite complex viewpoints that are completely different from what I consider true or even completely sane. A few of my friends are Christian conservatives, a couple others are gay liberals. They would probably mutually enjoy dancing on each other’s graves, so I can see the benefit of keeping them separate. But I don’t want to keep them separate from me. I practice the teaching of Johan Oscar Smith: To listen, even if to a drunk in the street. People are born into this world for a reason, and even if they mess up many things, they all have something to teach someone. That someone might be me.

So what bothers me is that when we all move to Google+, as any reasonable person would do unless they make some disastrous mistake, I may stop seeing many of the messages I see today: Messages that will now be sent only to certain groups where you expect your message to be accepted and lauded. I may not be one of those. The liberals will probably only send me notices of entirely superficial things, not what they really think. Quite possibly, unfortunately, the same may apply to the Christians and the Buddhists. I’m part of nobody’s in-crowd, except my guardian angel I guess.

So, I’m not really in a hurry with the Google+ thing. But I will at least try. I fully expect all of you to move over once you find out how awesome it is. Well, unless the Big Surprise form Facebook is a total revamp after the Google+ model.  We’ll see how it goes. I’ll keep you posted if I get in.

 

Not losing weight here!

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“I’ll definitely work out for what I ate later…” This may not be quite as easy as one would believe, even if you really do work out. I speak from experience here.

Today I will write a small article about health and physiology. After all, I assume my reader to have a body and be keenly aware of it. Even though our lives in the body are rather short, we try to make it last a little longer and serve us a little better.

And there’s the small point that for each day you live, life expectancy rises by approximately 5 hours. (That’s in the first world, obviously things are improving faster in the third world.) So, death is approaching, but not by 24 hours a day. The longer you live, the longer your life expectancy. Nifty, huh?

Now, second only to smoking, fat is one of those things people know is Bad For You. There has been so much writing and broadcasting about this, there is hardly anyone in the English-speaking world who does not have a wary eye on their weight, or the weight of others. While some feel it is more important to enjoy life, most people have at least some interest in the issue. So here we go!

***

In official statistics, is is assumed that a grown man will burn about 2400 calories a day, a woman about 2000. The reason why we men burn more calories is that we are larger and have more muscles. The few remaining people who have hard physical work are not counted in these statistics, I believe, and neither are professional athletes. These are people who lie outside the normal range.  There is of course some individual variation.

Now that I walk an hour after work,  I burn 500 calories extra each day (my pulse watch shows 600, but that includes the basic 100 calories I would burn in an hour just by being myself). The smart reader would assume that these calories would be taken from my fat reserves, such as they are. I am not quite overweight, but my normal weight is right on the upper border of the recommended range.  (“Normal” weight in the literature, not that it is normal to be normal these days, it is normal to be moderately overweight.)

I went on the bathroom scales again. There is no sign of losing any weight after over two weeks of this.

Now, two weeks is not a lot. One pound of fat is approximately 3500 calories, which is roughly what I burn extra in a week. Diets or other techniques for rapid weight loss don’t actually reduce your fat very fast, but instead cause you to lose water, which can be lost and gained much faster. Some foods bind more water in the body than others, so it is possible to “lose weight fast” that way. Sweating a lot without drinking more can also cause you to “lose weight”, but is not good for your health at all!

Even if I burn 500 extra calories a day, I won’t lose weight if I eat 500 more calories too. That could easily happen: A large box of yogurt (half a liter is a common size here) contains about that many calories. So it could easily happen if I am just a little more hungry than usual. With light exercise this is very common, unless you also go on a diet and count calories.

Then there is the small detail that “weight” is not the same as “fat”. If I use my muscles more than usual, they may become larger – this happens especially easily to us men – and muscle mass is actually heavier than fat. So a man who is not overweight could easily gain weight by exercising! Obviously this requires that one eats that much protein, which muscles are made from. But there is plenty of protein in the western diet, both from plants and animals.

In my case, there is yet another reason why I might not lose weight: I may be actually burning 3000 calories a day already. This is not so relevant for most of my readers, who get a fairly large percentage of their calories from fat. I did too, until I got a chronic illness that strikes if I eat more than a few grams of fat in each meal. So I cannot eat typical fatty foods like cakes, cookies, sauces, chocolate, butter, margarine, mayonnaise and similar bread spreads, or most meat dinners.

In the first months after I dropped eating fatty foods, I lost weight, and quite a bit of it.  Some of it never came back. But gradually my digestion adjusted so I could eat larger portions of starch and sugary foods, and digest them efficiently. It is entirely possible that I eat 3000 calories a day, I have not sat down and counted them.

You would think that if I actually ate 3000 calories a day, I would have gained weight steadily over the last years.  But it is not that simple. When you eat both fat and carbs, the body will prefer to burn the carbs (it is faster and easier) but store the fat.  If you eat very little fat, the body will not be able to store much.  Carbs cannot be converted to fat easily. It is possible, but unlike some animals, humans really suck at converting sugar to fat. Only a small portion makes it over, almost all of it is lost along the way, and simply becomes waste heat.

(Fructose, which is a common sweetener in the USA, is more readily converted to fat. If I lived in America, I would probably be fatter. But I live in Norway, where fructose is rare. It is mostly found in honey, and I don’t eat much of that.)

So you can see, there are numerous reasons why I may not lose weight even though I burn 500 calories extra on fast walking each day. That is not a tragedy for me, since I am not dangerously fat. And in any case, there are health benefits to being active beyond losing weight. In fact, it is uncertain whether overweight is dangerous at all. Obesity probably is, but moderate overweight may be more a symptom of inactivity rather than a danger in itself.  Danish statistics show that overweight people who bike regularly (a common combination in Denmark, thanks to the flat terrain and delicious pastries) don’t suffer the metabolic syndrome that plagues overweight car drivers.

In other good news, weight loss from exercise is far more likely if you are already unnaturally fat. Obese people will generally not feel hungrier after moderate exercise than without; in fact, most of them will feel less hungry after light or moderate exercise like walking, biking or swimming. This is because this level of activity stimulates the brain centers that regulate the appetite. Moving about is the normal behavior in humans “in the wild”, so the body works best when we do this, including the brain.  So if you fall in that category, you should definitely start walking or something like that, but very moderately at first. Don’t suddenly start running without consulting your doctor!

I, however, may have to start running if I want to lose weight. Or I could eat less, I suppose. I have not really decided whether I should do that, though. I just want to maintain the body so I don’t lose it from sheer negligence.

 

Google 2-step verification

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Some of you may remember that my Google account was hacked some months ago. I am still not sure how. I did suspect an app on my Android phone, where I typed in my password out of habit since it was associated with Google – but actually only displayed Google News, which don’t need the password. However, I am not sure that was the reason, or even that it was my password it asked for – there was just an input box that displayed over the screen.

Another possibility is that the thieves simply assumed that I used the same password on Google as I used everywhere else on the Internet. They were right – at the time I did use the same password pretty much everywhere. Then again I did not register at naughty places, having no need for that. The most dubious were probably the message boards for web comics, and those were already getting old at the time. I am not the kind of user who signs up for free gifts at random places. I am not exactly paranoid, obviously, but generally cautious.  Maybe one of those sites were hacked. I run various anti-spyware program on my Windows machines – Linux don’t need those, and that’s a fact for now at least.

In any case, back then I was lucky: The thieves only sent spam to everyone in my rather small contact list, and mostly just random letters at that. But there is now a more cruel and insidious hacker league on the warpath. Once they have control of your Google account – or Yahoo for those who use that – they send mail telling your friends that you have met some dramatic misfortune abroad and need money to get home, could they please lend you some. They also obtain enough information from your mails to answer any simple request from the cautious friend, rather than relying on a fire and forget approach. Mail the stolen account and they will pretend to be you, to the best of their limited abilities.

I am making it quite a bit harder for them, I think, by enabling the fairly new feature of 2-step verification. There are a couple ways of doing the extra verification, but as I have a smartphone, I downloaded the Google Authenticator. It is a small app that is only used for this purpose, to generate a random 6-digit code that is used in a separate screen after mail address and password.

In other words, after logging in normally to Google, you have to supply this pass code. During setup, the account is tied to this particular phone, so the thief also need your phone in addition to your password, to hack your account. Now I just need to not lose my phone!  People do that a lot, I hear.  I lost a mobile phone some years ago, during a train ride.

However, you don’t need to use this code generator every time you want to check your mail. You do it when you would normally need to sign in: When you start using a new computer, or when you have not used this one for a while, especially if you have used another computer in the meantime. For me, logging on seems to be needed mostly after power outages but otherwise a couple times a week.

As for the phone itself, I had to write in a lengthy one-time password. For good measure, the phone was about to run out of power at the time, after only 17 hours of mostly non-use. If I ever go on a long trip again, I should probably have an extra battery. A bit inconvenient to not be able to access my mail because my phone is out of power.

There are a couple back-up measures. The setup generates a handful of pre-defined codes for your account, that can be used instead of those from the authenticator. So you can print those out and put them in your wallet or purse or shirt pocket for when the smartphone app is not available.

Another option is to get them via text or voicemail to a secondary phone, such as work phone or landline. I don’t have a landline anymore, and to my surprise I had a hard time remembering my work phone number, even though I remember it effortlessly when at work. (I have to enter it daily in a program.) I am also wary because I had my mobile phone as backup last time, when my account was hacked, and they never sent the new password even though the number was right. They said they did, but it never arrived. So I might have lost my account for good, had I thrown away the old computer which I used when I first got my Google account. Luckily I had it, and with it all details of when it was first set up. This convinced Google to give me back my account.  But if I had not descended from packrats, I would have been in trouble.

Anyway, I am not sure I have less chance of losing access to my account now. But I have less chance of sending y’all spam if it happens, and that is good.

To do this yourself, open Gmail and choose Settings (at the top). There, choose Accounts and import, and Other Google account settings. A new page opens, which includes “Using 2-step verification”. Or that’s where I did it.

More fun with surveys

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“You have to sit in a block of steel which moves at an unbelievable speed.” -This is actually pretty much how I feel about cars. You can probably not even imagine how I feel about TV.  Let us say that references to the Apocalypse come unbidden to my mind…

Synovate, my provider of Norwegian surveys, sent me another one. This time I may win an iPad! Somehow I don’t think that will happen. Actually I suspect all of my surveys are quietly filtered out at the very beginning of the processing. There is probably some algorithm that scans the results and rejects those that are obviously not made by a human. And that’s where I think mine go.

This time it was TV. I managed to answer the two first questions, which were about names of cable TV providers, of which I knew 3. It went downhill from there.
Do you have…
O – Digital TV
O – Analog TV
O – Don’t know
I don’t even have a TV, and I know that quite well! Still, my best hope for the iPad was to pick the least misleading. So from there on and out the survey it was “Don’t know”.

It is not the first time.
What brand of car does your household have? “I don’t know” (don’t have a car).
What part of the world did you go on vacation last year? “I don’t know” (don’t go on vacations).
Which radio programs do you listen to? “I don’t know” (don’t listen to radio).
Which newspapers do you subscribe to? “I don’t know” (none).
Which of the following movie ads have you seen? “I don’t know” (don’t go to the movies).
What do you think of the following soap operas (or something like that)? “I don’t know” (still don’t have a TV).
Which readymade dinner do prefer? “I don’t know” (don’t buy readymade dinner).
Which air plane company did you last use and why? “I don’t know” (it’s been 25 years after all).
And so on and so forth.

It isn’t exactly that I am dead to the world. If they asked me what mobile phones I used, I could answer them. They did in fact once ask me about web services, and I did answer. (But I did not win anything…) I could probably still say something about computers, unless they included the “last 12 months” as they sometimes do. I also once recognized some snacks! Admittedly most of them were familiar names from before the fat intolerance, but I still occasionally buy some small snack.  And I have pretty strong opinions on soda (Pepsi Raw / Natural is The Best!).

So I don’t subsist entirely on water, spiritual books and City of Heroes. But evidently I am still far from normal. I am not sure that is a bad thing, though.

Music, books and countries

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If you have a PC (or Mac, or Android phone) you can use the Internet to store your music. Actually you can do that anyway – Ubuntu Linux has had this for at least a year – but it is new to Amazon. com. And unlike Ubuntu One, it is for Americans only.

Amazon.com has launched a “cloud drive” service for their MP3 shop. People can save the MP3 files directly to these servers (not actual clouds, luckily) and play them from anywhere. Anywhere in the USA, that is.  Amazon.com does not sell MP3 files overseas, although ironically they sell CDs, which you can then rip and upload to competing “cloud” providers. It’s a good thing sending all those physical objects across the globe does not cause some kind of climate change or anything, since the end result is exactly the same, with the addition of a CD on a landfill.

I think it is safe to assume that the restrictions on export of MP3 files are due to negotiations with the RIAA, the Recording Industry Asses of America or something very similar to that. It bears mention that I have bought several books in electronic form from Amazon, quickly and without hassle, across the Atlantic. This fits with my impression that book publishers may be greedy like the rest of us, but fundamentally sane. The RIAA, on the other hand, systematically comes across as a collective psychiatric basketcase, more exactly organized paranoia. These are the guys, if you remember, who wanted many millions from a single mother for a couple dozen pretty boring music tracks.

Not to sow doubt about their clinical insanity and need for strong medication and straitjackets, but there is a fundamental difference between books and music that may explain their behavior to some small degree. Whereas music has been with us since time immemorial, canned music is a far more recent invention than the written word.  Books, in some form, is a mainstay of civilization. It could even be argued that civilization as we know it would be hard to maintain without them. Certainly a high-level civilization is unlikely to evolve without a lengthy phase of written records.  So basically, we know books, their causes and effects.

And it so happens that people who read books tend to be regarded as civilized. Whether this is cause or effect, or perhaps both, I am not sure.  As a friend likes to quote from The Penultimate Peril: “Wicked people never have time for reading. It’s one of the reasons for their wickedness.” Music, on the other hand, is often seen as loosening the bands of civilization (although this varies with the type of music, I would say.)

It may not always have been exactly like this. During my recent reading of Dante’s Inferno, there was a mention of an adulterous couple who had supposedly fallen in sin by reading a romance novel together, and consequently went to hell as they never repented.  My immediate reaction was “Who the hell would read a romance novel together with someone of the opposite sex if they were not already planning to do that thing?”  But it goes to show that books may once have been viewed with a certain suspicion which is now reserved for more modern technologies.

Mind to mind

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Are you a bioluminiscent girl in real life too?

G.K. Chesterton writes (“In Defense of Ugly Things”): “There are some people who state that the external, sex or physique, of another person is indifferent to them, that they care only for the communion of mind with mind; but these people will not detain us. There are some statements that no one ever thinks of believing, however often they are made.”

I suspect this was spot on, throughout the thousands of years before the Internet. Now, however, I have numerous buddies (I can’t really call them close friends, but more so than my neighbors and almost all of my coworkers) who I have never seen even in a picture. These are people I have met on blogs, forums, mailing lists, USENET groups, or in online games. In some cases I don’t know the gender; in some cases I think I know it, but I may be wrong. In most cases I don’t know the color of their skin, the color of their hair, whether they are thin or fat, sometimes even not whether or not they are in a wheelchair.

Let me be honest. If I had actually met them in the flesh, it would almost certainly have colored my impression of what they said afterwards. I’m not really happy about this, but I am still that much human. I might be able to correct my mind to compensate for my prejudices, but probably not exactly. And of course even now I may have some idea about how they look, at least in some cases, on a subconscious level. But by and large, it is indeed a communication of mind with mind.

We live in an age of wonders. Many things that seemed not even miraculous but flat out impossible in the 1930es are now taken for granted. And the Internet is one of them. Actually, the Internet is many of them, and perhaps will be many more in the years that still remain for our civilization.

Looking at phones to Desire them?

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Vaguely related: If you want to exchange phone numbers or mail address with someone, it is customary to ASK, not knock them down, grab their mobile phone and add your phone number and mail address. But Desire makes blind, as you can see.

I read a review of the new LG Optimus 2X today. It looks to be good value for an acceptable price (by Norwegian standards, people in the 1st world and below may need to save up for a while first). Now if I can avoid referring to it as Optimus Prime, it certainly looks like a candidate.

It seems to be marginally ahead of HTC Desire HD, which I have also considered for a while, but which I hesitate to buy because of the name. You may say this is picky, but would you buy a mobile phone labelled Scientology for instance, if it was not dazzlingly better than the competition? Or “Allahu Akbar” perhaps? All of us have things we are proud of and things we are ashamed of, and they are not the same for all of us. I am not proud of desire. It has caused lots of trouble both for me and others.

And on that note, it would be sorely ironic if I avoid the HTC Desire HD because of the name, but still desire it in my heart. As it happens, my gadget lust has faded a bit since its height a few years ago. A lot of things fade when one live the kind of life I live. But there is still some excitement left, so I’m not buying for a while yet unless my HTC Hero goes down for the count.  Hero, now that’s a name to love.  As the inhabitants of Paragon City say:  “Forget all those postmodernist deconstructionists. Itland is a hero, plain and simple.”

That said, I do intend to buy either a large mobile phone or a small tablet this year if no particular disaster strikes.  The Hero is such a part of my life that I feel rather naked without it. Mainly because it is my only portable Internet connection and e-book reader.  Phone calls and text messages are so scarce that I would hardly notice if those did not work. But being able to read your Twitter and Facebook posts on the potty where they rightly belong is a great boon.  (OK, I actually tend to read them on the bus, but still.)

The Hero is a bit small though. Typing with my big fingers could have been better with just a little more screen space.  I certainly won’t need an iPad for that for many years yet, Light willing, but an extra centimeter would make a good improvement. Reading also benefits from more and better screen. Again, I may prefer a large mobile phone over a tablet or pad, simply for privacy purposes. There is no reason why random strangers should know that you are reading Dante rather than some tabloid or a juicy mail from your lover.

Anyway, I have what I need for now, so I can afford to wait for a while yet. Unless something goes up in smoke, though, it seems pretty certain that my next computer will fit in a large pocket.

Forum trolls

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One way to keep the level of online aggression down is to make the place more girlfriendly. But that is not always an option.

In the online world, there is an unpleasant and common thing called “forum trolls”. These are people who take part in discussions in order to enrage others. In the wider sense, any discussion forum could have trolls, even mailing lists and of course good old Usenet, for those who remember that. Blog comment sections are not spared either, although the blog authors usually clean up the mess when they check in.

What is the cause of this phenomenon, and what can we do to diminish it? Clearly most people would like to see less or none of it. Right?

Here is an article by Clay Shirky in Harward Business Review: Cleaning Up Online Conversation. He argues that there are mainly two factors that promotes trolling: Size (large chance of being seen) and anonymity (small change of having it come back to bite you).  By making forums more specific, encouraging identity, and giving ordinary users the power to bury the idiot comments, the problem can be greatly diminished. Examples of successful forums are given.

I would add that one alternative is to attract a different audience. For instance, nobody could start a flame war on the Project Meditation forum. The regulars and all but the greenest of visitors belong to the five-dimensional Realm of the Good or above. If you behave like an asshat, they will behave like an arhat in return. They will pity you and try to help you. This is because of the big difference in the level of understanding and purpose. A teacher will not quarrel with a grade school pupil, and a doctor will not quarrel with a patient. People whose purpose in life is to be healers of souls, will not be enraged when they see sick souls.

If a place is clean and well lit, roaches are unlikely to be much of a problem. Even should they show up, they cannot stay in such a place.

Of course, this is not really an option for most forums on the Internet. Yet. But when we have built a civilization that can stand the test of time, a Golden Age, a New Enlightenment, then perhaps this will be the rule. Until then, we shall have to just extend the light what little we can, each of us seeking to shine brightly for the benefit of all around us.