Balancing Humanity and Technology

I’ve been listening to a podcast called Team Human ever since the host Douglas Rushkoff was a guest on another favourite podcast, You Are Not So Smart. The basic premise of the podcast, book of the same name, and indeed the guest episode he appeared on, was about taking back society for humans.

It took me a while to warm up to the argument. Rushkoff was writing about the cyberpunk movement when I was still in high school, and wears his counter-culture credentials with pride. Me with my quiet Australian suburban Christian upbringing know nothing about what was happening in technology circles in that time, or what anyone was really even railing against back then.

So the idea that technology today isn’t really serving humans any more made me stop and think. And it’s stupidly obvious when you give it more than a moment’s thought, but it hadn’t really occurred to me that it’s the exact reason I’m lost on the internet nowadays.

Today we’re served by technology more than ever, and the internet is responsible for the feeling that we’re getting more done, and we’re more connected than ever before, but despite the vision of early internet visionaries, we’re also stuck in tiny silos, and fighting bigger and bigger monopolies for control of our data.

Instead of really serving us, technology is being used to sell us, divide us, and make us happy to hand over everything that makes us human. Which isn’t to say that we should head back to caves and poop in the open, but we need to be able to make informed choices about how our data is used.

Full disclosure: I’ve tried to write this article before, and encourage you all to switch to fastmail.com, and duckduckgo.com, but every time I start it, I see the little Google Home on my wall blasting out electro swing and telling me when my pomodoro timer is complete, and I wail and gnash my teeth for being a godless hypocrite.

A small Google Home device attached to a wall under a piece of art

out, foul temptress

The upshot is, I’m extremely interested in how we can maintain our privacy and autonomy while still enjoying the benefits of connected technology. I don’t want to miss out on the benefits that these big companies can provide, but I also want to know that it’s serving me, not the other way around. I believe we forfeit too much data to large companies, but I also believe the benefits and fun of technology can make the trade off worthwhile if we do not enter into it with our eyes closed.

I’m looking for is a community of people who are also treading that fine line between tin-foil-hattery and open embrace of our corporate overlords to work within the system to make it safer for humans.

Rushkoff would argue that this isn’t possible online. He wants people to get out there and make real face-to-face connections with people. I get where he’s coming from - by communicating online, we’re letting algorithms and companies decide who we talk to - pushing us into silos of like-minded people. That happens in real life too, but the process is manual - we have to decide to stop talking to someone whose ideas aren’t our ideas. Online, the algorithms are getting better and better at showing us similarly minded people, sheltering us from “the other” before we have to ask.

Take YouTube for instance - I recently discovered a Star Trek youtuber who also happens to also do videos about rationalism and atheism. He’s exactly my cup of tea, and I spent a good few evenings listening through his back catalogue. Then another guy popped up who makes videos poking fun at far-right youtubers and then another who makes videos about the differences between right and left. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed them all, and they give me just that little tickle of satisfaction that I’ve discovered someone else who “shares my thoughts” on these topics. In some sense they play a role to help cement or crystallise thoughts I hadn’t yet properly synthesised into my own words, so it’s not bad that I get these recommendations, but over time if YouTube’s AI does it’s job, it does mean I’m going to see fewer and fewer alternative ideas, hear fewer voices, and fall deeper and deeper into that filter bubble that people talk about a lot lately1.

I don’t know how to socialise in the real world any more. It’s a lost art for many people, and even close to impossible for others. The internet brought on a golden age of social interaction for some people who in years gone by might have lived lives of utter loneliness. I’m not one of them, but I’ve let myself lose a lot of the skills I once had to leave the house and be “real”. Finding the time and strength to put myself in places the algorithm can’t get me is going to be hard work. I would even like to think there might be a technological solution, but it would have to be radically different from anything else that currently exists, or it risks being susceptible to the same problems as today’s social technology.

The upshot is that I’m starting to see the cracks, and I don’t have the tools to even understand them, let alone fix them by myself. I fix problems better when I have other people to work with, and I don’t know if other people around me are also seeing the cracks and wondering if they should say something or just keep quiet. If you’re reading this, and you’re concerned about what we can do to balance safety and progress, then get in touch with me. Leave a comment here2, or say hello on Telegram, Discord or now Mastodon or Keybase. Maybe you don’t think the way I do - and I look forward to it.


  1. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing that all voices deserve to be heard, or that all arguments on all sides have equal merit. Honestly I don’t know the answer to “how do you avoid a filter bubble, but also not get drowned in shit” 

  2. If it works… 

Letting the Internet Die

I’m still stuck on this idea of how to enable comments and feedback on personal netlogs[^netlog] in this world of Facebook and Twitter.

Almost everything I can come up with falls into a couple of broad categories.

  1. Hosted by me. For example, enabling comments here or in a self-hosted forum. Comments here are obviously the easiest and I’ve had comments enabled ever since I started (although now limited to new posts only). A self-hosted forum is adding a barrier to entry that offers no incentive for people to bother, and isn’t really appropriate for my readership of three[^navel].

  2. Outsourced. This includes all discussion on Twitter, Facebook, Discord, Telegram, Discourse, or Disqus. These all require readers/commenters and me to both use the platform, and give up our privacy/rights to those comments to varying degrees based on how much we trust those platforms.

I have a couple of guiding principals I believe in when it comes to the internet. One is that it’s super important it remains as open as possible - as free from government interference as possible (within reason), but also as free from corporate interference as possible too. Governments will always overreach and overreact, so it’s handy that for years the internet has sort of routed around the problem when governments go rogue. More could be done on this front of course, but to my mind the biggest threat isn’t government interference as it is citizen indifference.

By putting so much of our online lives in the hands of large social media companies, we’re dulling the gears that make the internet such a powerful force for social change. Think about it - imagine a group that uses Facebook to mobilise their protests and activism in a country similar to our own. I’m going to use Facebook through this example, but it could just as easily be any other large social site.

So imagine this group of activists - their message is irrelevant, suffice to say it’s something important to them, and potentially dangerous to powerful people in their country. For those powerful people, all it takes to decommission the group is cut off their access to Facebook. If that group hasn’t met in person, shared contact details outside of that channel, or prepared alternate means of communication then they’re effectively deaf and blind when they try to continue communicating. Not only that, but they are mute as well.

On top of that - to people in other countries not affected by the same struggles - they might as well be invisible if their only presence has been on Facebook. On the flip side, for people outside those problems we’re allowing a company - or even a foreign power - limit what we see. We’re also limiting ourselves to those formats that get traction on those sites - for Facebook it’s the Single Grainy Image With Text. How much can we learn about the world from a single picture?

I’m stumbling into /r/iamverysmart territory here, which is not my intention - I have a limited grasp of the socio-political realities of my own neighbourhood, let alone what other people are struggling with elsewhere in the world, but relying on Facebook (or Reddit, or Twitter) as our means of engaging with the world leaves us vulnerable and open to manipulation.

Which is why I miss the days of netlogs. It seemed like for a period of about two years, the internet was exploding with this vibrant eclectic mix of freely shared, highly personal content. Going through my site and cleaning it out I remembered I used to be subscribed to a guy who just talked about toy Transformers. That guy stopped writing in 2011 without any fanfare and I completely missed it. There was someone else who I discovered when I realised I needed a way to be a good parent to my child when my wife is a Christian, and I an atheist. That guy stopped writing his netlog in 2013 and again I didn’t notice the loss. So many more sites refuse to load at all - buried in a sort of DNS graveyard, or worse returned zombified as placeholder pages full of ads. The least worst fate is for a site to at least still load - quiet and untouched by human hands as a monument or shrine to the moments they capture.

How much of that is captured on Twitter or Facebook now? The content might be there - but it’s trapped behind accounts and subscriptions, real-time feeds and algorithms that show people what they’re told they want to see. And it’s making it easier for corporations, foreign powers, and your own leaders to hide what they don’t want you to see.

That’s enough of a trek into conspiracy theory and nostalgia for one night. I understand how much I’m teetering between crackpot and melodrama with the above. I really just want more people to think about this stuff. It’s much easier to talk about possible solutions when we’re on the same page. Because I don’t know what the solution is. Spinning this site up is step one. Figuring out how to discuss this stuff with people who want to talk is step two. … Profit?

[^netlog]:I will use this term unless one of you can come up with something better than blog [^navel]:It seems even more self-aggrandising than my self indulgent comment discussion navel gazing

Pong

I find myself in the fun position of following up on a follow-up post to my follow-up on Rubenerds original post.

I mean, if we both used Facebook, this would just be a series of comments, but where’s the fun in that? As Rubenerd says, “it reminded me of the blogosphere of old”, and I’m enjoying the feeling of a proper back and forth. And unlike a Facebook comment, his post can be read completely independently, with his thoughts and musings taking their own tangents without the feeling that it all needs to tie back into my post like we’re arguing about something. It’s like a layer cake, or a meat trifle or something.

But as he said, the blogs[^nicer] of old are fading out. Most people just don’t bother, unless they’re part of some large conglomeration. Maybe this is just the evolution of the web, as the weaker writers give up from lack of traffic, and the stronger ones either get grabbed by companies who can pay them, or just keep on solidly pushing through publishing post after post of eclectic material, not for the world but for themselves. Rubenerd is definitely of the latter, while I am one of those weaker ones who got tired of feeling like I was talking to myself. Or I was bad at it.

So while I’m giving it another shot, I can’t imagine how long I’ll last this time. Which brings me back round to RSS. I settled on FreshRSS because it was PHP based and my host had an install script. Not much of a reason to base my decision on, except that I’ve tried TT-RSS before and while I was happy enough with the software, the support left me feeling a bit eh about the whole thing[^eh]. So Rubenerd, if you’re listening, I’d be happy to set up an account on my instance of FreshRSS if you want to try it out.

Of course, this is all academic if I never use the thing, and I’m not sure I’m going to. As I said in my previous post, reddit scratches that itch I have to find new content. But even that is a bit filter-bubbly despite an amazing breadth of sources on /r/all. What I need is an ever changing list of semi-random content to peruse on my mobile. I wonder if there are any federated RSS aggregators?

And don’t get me started on federated replacements for Facebook Messenger. I have one colleague at work who I keep roping in to try new messaging platforms, and I think he hates me now. In fact I know Mike hates me because he just cycles through each app to message me how much he hates me. I can’t blame him - my phone creaks under the weight of the following in no particular order:

  • Pulse (SMS)
  • Yammer (for work team chat until Microsoft Teams is available to us)
  • Discord (what I tried when I was trying to find something like Slack)
  • Telegram (my preferred replacement for FM (Facebook Messenger) with my family)
  • Wickr Me (I know exactly one person that uses it)
  • Wire (I can’t make anyone use it, not even Mike)
  • Google Hangouts (I can’t bring myself to use it)
  • Duo (pre-installed on Huey, my phone)
  • And three different email apps

Most recently I’ve also installed Keybase, which is so loaded with the buzzword promise of blockchain I couldn’t not try it out. Rubenerd wasn’t there - which as the only person I know who’s actually published a PGP key - surprised me a little. Keybase is chock full of people who have published PGP keys. If you want to hit me up there, my Keybase profile is here. Maybe someone smarter than me can tell me why it isn’t a sound technology, but although it’s based on technology by one company, you can’t get much more federated than blockchain, even if it’s not exactly what we mean when use the term.

One last thing Rubenerd before I go. If not comments, at least enable pingbacks and ping other people when you link them. Otherwise I might not notice you’ve published until I go to my feed reader.

[^nicer]:Why did we never find a nicer sounding word? [^eh]:See my final note on that page for an explanation

Unfriendly

I haven’t properly “blogged” here in so very long. With so many other social sites around like the Facebloops and the whatnots, it’s seemed a little pointless putting anything up here where no one would read it. I could post a pic of my kids on that site that everyone has an account for and get a bunch of interactions there instead, so putting the effort into this site seemed pointless.

The sheer lazyness of it is exactly what Mark Zuckerberg is counting on. Posting on Facebook takes no effort, it’s simple, and your pictures and rants and low effort posting gets seen and liked and commented on, and no one ever wants to leave, unless they held out for years and never joined in the first place. And if you want to chat to your mum, or your wife through anything other than SMS, are you really going to make them install something else like Telegram instead of just using Messenger?

But I can’t be lazy any more. I quit Twitter years ago (and finally deleted it a week ago), and this week I’m quitting Facebook. All the cool kids are doing it, but none of the cool kids I know do, so I’m the dumbass who has to look like a hipster wannabe rebel and close down my account. So I’m not “closing” it - I’ve simply deleted most of what information there was about me, unfriended everyone, and left a public message that people should email me or visit my site here from now on. I hope people don’t get too offended. I’ve already been told off my my wife for removing the fact that we’re married from her profile… I probably didn’t think through some of the side effects here.

I’m holding out for something new and federated. Something where I can own my data, but still share it in a way that’s easy and lets old friends and family I never get to see know I’m alive. There are promising beginnings out there, but they all suffer from not being easy to set up, or not having enough people, or just plain not being what I’m really looking for. And no, Slack isn’t it - it’s just as closed and proprietary as Facebook.

If you’ve come here from Facebook to see what I’m doing or get in touch, you can email me. My personal email is Josh (my name) at demands.coffee - I know it doesn’t look like an email address, but trust me it is. And if you want to instant message me, download and [add me on Telegram] - it’s the closest thing to Facebook Messenger I’ve found that actually cares about privacy, security of your messages, and is just plain useful. And if you’re really paranoid, I’ve got a Wickr account too.

Comixology: Comparing Digital Comic Readers

David Hawkins at What Culture! asks Can Marvel Digital Comics Conquer The Comic Readers of the World?

The Marvel Comics apps for Chrome, iOS and PSP let you read a large swath of the Marvel back-catalogue online or on your Apple/Sony devices. You can subscribe for $60US a year, and read a lot of classic Marvel comics, as well as a selection of the new stuff.

“You wouldn’t like me on a tiny screen”

David has been collecting printed comics for 20 years, and says he was spending hundreds of dollars on comics in a month before trying out the Marvel Digital route.

I too have been going digital, but I’ve been coming at it from a different direction. As an Android user, I discovered the Comixoligy comic store before I discovered the Marvel store. For the uninitiated, the Comixology store offers comics from a range of publishers (except Marvel) on iOS devices and Android, as well as through your browser. For the first time in my life, I’ve been enjoying comics the way I imagine most of my comic-loving peers used to when they were younger.

I’m going to go through my experience with Comixology as it compares to the Marvel experience using the couple of dot-points David used:

Price

I’m a comics late-starter. I’ve always loved the idea of comics, but never had the disposable income to spend on them. As I’ve gotten older and gradually come into a bit of spare cash, I’ve found comics have gotten more expensive to match, and the value I perceive from them has decreased. When I was a kid and could get my hands on a comic here or there, I was always somewhat disappointed that they were so chock full of ads, and never finished an arc in the one I happened to have then and there. For most comic-book nerds, the huge sweeping arcs are the draw card to buy the next one, but for a poor Aussie kid, the chances of seeing the next story in the saga was exceedingly slim. Comixology offers a number of free comics including a back-log of FCBD comics, and first issues from popular series. The remaining comics start from 99c up to $5 for some of the more esoteric comics available, but are very fairly priced compared to their off-the-shelf couterparts.

Range

Range is the first point where Comixology beats the Marvel store hands-down. Take a look at this list of publishers. There are 46 publishers of varying popularity and quality, and most tellingly - DC gets pride of place on the web store. I don’t know which came first, but it makes sense that DC would use Comixology’s infrastructure rather than build their own to compete with Marvel. The remaining contributors are a diverse bunch, including Dark Horse, Image (publishers of my current favourite comic Chew), and even Comixology’s own brand.

*Marvel on iOS only…

Age

This can vary a bit on the Comixology store. Like David, I was worried all I would find would be old comics, but I’m finding a nice mix of old and new. Every week seems to bring a release of old classics such as Batman #1 through #25. I recenly got to read the (sadly ridiculous) Green Lantern: Emerald Twilight Saga during a movie inspired Green Lantern 1/2 price sale. On the flip side, I’ve decided I’ll use my new-found comic-powers to actually read some history-making comics as they’re released, and I’m following DC’s latest universe editing Flashpoint story as it unfolds. I think it’s a few issues behind (at writing I’ve read #2 in the main story), but this is only to be expected - as David points out, “You are never going to get the newest comics that are currently sitting on the shelves. If you did you would find many small comic stores going out of business”

Search is search. I’m 99% certain that the reason I haven’t found certain comics using the built-in search is that they just aren’t in the store. One neat feature of the Marvel store that the Comixology store is missing is a “search by character” feature to bring up all appearances of certain characters. With just the Marvel universe to cover, this might be more straight-forward than keeping all the various “Ultraman” characters from every comic publisher in order, so it’s no real surprise. On the other hand, the mobile app lets you browse by genre, creator, publisher and story arc and the web interface integrates these into the search feature, so you can find all of Alan Moore’s work (well, everything they have) in an instant.

Ease of Use

The mobile interface has a few quirks navigating the store, and the web-app is Flash-based and feels clunky at times. These are minor quibles though, as the comic reading experience is first class. Using Guided View^TM^ Technology (that name is pulled straight from the app’s marketing), single panels and pages are carefully cropped and shown as big as your display will allow and carefully edited for clarity and dramatic impact. Compared to the Marvel reader, this is far-and-away the biggest and most important difference between the two experiences.

Atomic Robo

After using Comixology’s reader, I found the Marvel version clunky and inelegant. Both guide your reading across the page, but only Comixology seems to know what it’s doing. Admittedly, this is only a software upgrade away on the Marvel store, but at the moment it’s a big difference. Tellingly, I also find myself wishing to read paper comics a panel at a time now - I find I enjoy it just a little more not to be able to see the secrets revealed further down the page until I get there.

Experience

I haven’t been a comic collector long. My earliest experiences with comics were devouring my Uncle’s Duck Tales and Mickey Mouse comics whenever I visited him, but I never had comics to call my own until I started making select purchases at comic sales when I could. I enjoy pulling them out now and then including a fun Deadpool special that’s essentially “Back To The Future” with Spiderman, and a collection of goofy Amalgam comics that I’m stupidly happy with. However, my collection leaves a lot to be desired, and I’m annoyed I haven’t had the chance to read some of the important stories that make up my favourite comic universes. So I can’t really compare reading comics on a tiny screen to the joy of poring over a freshly minted book, as I’ve really only done the latter recently on a very low-key scale. Additionally, my first chance to read some classic tales like The Dark Knight Returns and the Spiderman Clone Saga were thanks to my oddly well-informed local library, but they’ve been bound in hard cover or omnibus versions, so it’s not the same thing true comic collectors experience anyway. As someone just coming into comics though, the experience of the Comixology store and reader has been revolutionary. The prices are what I used to wish comics would be at the local store and, most compelling of all, the titles are all ad free.

DC available on iOS too!

I’m not sure if Marvel or Comixology will conquer the readers of the world, but they offer a new way to consume comics if you aren’t hung up on having them on paper. Digital comics are here, and Comixology offers a classy hassle-free way to get your fix.

Google!! Get it together!

The decisions Google makes don’t normally annoy me, except in small geeky ways that most people would pfft at, and you may well pfft at me now but they are seriously annoying me now.

://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/21469363/ The Google Master Plan http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/ / CC BY 2.0

On one hand we have the recent integration of Buzz into Gmail and Google Reader. The upshot being:

  1. You cannot disable Buzz without disabling your carefully tended Google Profile.
  2. Because you cannot disable Buzz, you end up slowly accruing followers - you could ignore them, but you start to look like an ass.
  3. So you follow back and this breaks Google Reader.
  4. So the choice is between using Google Reader OR Google Buzz to read content from others. Google Buzz is so tightly integrated with Google Reader that I can only choose one or the other. There is no way I can see to effectively and simply use both at the same time.

But then on the other hand:

  1. Nothing looks the same as anything else - the interfaces of some products have similar elements, but there’s no universally consistent theme to the products.
  2. Google Translate (which is so nicely integrated into Google Reader) is not integrated into Buzz, so all the non-english-speaking people I follow are just so much noise to me.
  3. Google Bookmarks (which I used to use a great deal) now houses the annotations you make to Google results (starring results and so on) but
  4. Google Chrome doesn’t use Google Bookmarks to store your bookmarks (!?) it uses Google Docs.
  5. On top of that, I am yet to be able to actually produce a two-way sync across Chrome at home and at work.

So riddle me this Google: why are some products tightly integrated - inextricably so - while others barely work in ways that would make absolute sense to the user? Normally I can see where you’re going with things - heck, I write a site just about Google Wave - but in these couple of cases, it seems you’re making decisions not based on what’s best for the user, but forging ahead with integration only when it will push a product that you deem worth your time. No one was clamoring for Buzz. They thought it would be nice if Google entered the Social Networking space, but not at the expense of your other products. But users have been asking for years for tighter integration of products that matter to them - translate, bookmarks, the defunct notebook, docs and calendar.

I realise these are all different teams of people. I realise they’re all working as hard as they can on what they’re doing. But Google the Company needs to stop occasionally and say “Maybe we need to focus on fixing and integrating what we already offer before we introduce this new shiny toy”.

Google, you have a lot of excellent products - please pay them some attention occasionally and get them talking to each other.

Wordpress Plugins I Can't Live Without

There are a number of Wordpress plugins I use to do various bits and bobs around the Geekorium. The Skribit tab and the Blogroll at the side are both produced with plugins for example. But there are some plugins that you never really “see” as such - they do their work silently behind the scenes, and most of them are primarily there to make my life easier. If you run a Wordpress site, you might be interested too. These are the plugins I have both here and on First Waves because they’re just so damn useful. Below is an introduction to each, and my explaination for why I use them:

  • After The Deadline Adds a contextual spell, style, and grammar checker to WordPress. Write better and spend less time editing. Raphael Mudge

    This plugin adds options to your profile page to check for grammar and spelling errors. Chrome usually picks up most spelling errors anyway, but this is great for picking up my awful grammatical errors. I use a lot of Passive Voice for example, and this highlights it.

  • SyntaxHighlighter Evolved Easily post syntax-highlighted code to your site without having to modify the code at all. Uses Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter v2.0.320 and some code by Andrew Ozz of Automattic.Viper007Bond

    I can’t pretend I write a lot of code, but this one is so pretty and useful I can’t leave it out. It highlights code blocs in whatever language you specify. Check out this post to see it in action.

  • Smart Link Lets you write links as link text (explicit link), or as link text (implicit link). Denis de Bernardy

    This one was useful for the couple of times I remembered to use it. Kinda superceded now by the Textile plugin (see below) but for a while it was useful. Adding a link was as simple as:

    [this is the link text ->http://example.com]

  • Textile 2 (Improved) This is a wrapper for Jim Riggs’ PHP implementation of Brad Choate’s Textile 2. It is feature compatible with the MovableType plugin. Does not play well with the Markdown, Textile, or Textile 2 plugins that ship with WordPress. Packaged by Adam Gessaman.Adam Gessaman

    I’ve only just installed this plugin, so I’m yet to get used to using it. One of the annoying things about blogging is that I often include a lot of strong and emphasis tags, but hate typing them out. In fact, using the correct markup often puts me off doing what could otherwise be quite enjoyable. So after a bit of experimentation I settled on textile. Now I just use asterisks and underscores, and links are done like so:

    "This is the link text":http://example.com/

    There are a whole slew of other formatting options that will make marking up a post a heck of a lot faster and easier now, and much simpler to do on my iPhone.

  • wp-Typography Improve your web typography with:

    • hyphenation - over 40 languages supported,
    • Space control, includes: widow protection, gluing values to units, and forced internal wrapping of long URLs & email addresses,
    • Intelligent character replacement, including smart handling of: quote marks, dashes, ellipses, trademarks, math symbols, fractions, and ordinal suffixes, and
    • CSS hooks for styling: ampersands, uppercase words, numbers, initial quotes & guillemets. Jeffrey D. King

    Using the correct typography is as important to me as correct grammar. I love a good em-dash and my ellipsis must be the correct three-dot character, not just three full-stops! Doing it all by hand can be a PITA (Pain in the Arse) though (particularly with HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) entities) so why not just get a plugin that does it for you? It even transforms acronyms into proper small-caps and swaps out maths symbols with nicer ones!

  • WP-Footnotes Allows a user to easily add footnotes to a post.Simon Elvery

    This is seriously my favourite plugin of all time. It’s so simple it’s stupid, but I use it at least once in every post and often more. All it does is generate footnotes, but it’s so simple to use I can’t help but do it all the time.

    Simply type your text1

    It’s as easy as that. Instant footnote section at the bottom of your post! It gives me so much scope to just throw in asides and afterthoughts without ruining the flow of the text. I’ve resisted installing it on First Waves, because I strive to be somewhat more professional over there, but for my rambling stream-of-consciousness posts here it’s the bomb.

So those are my favourite post-writing plugins. Hopefully there are one or two that might appeal to you too2. If any one is interested, I’d be glad to share a couple of other useful plugins I use. What plugins do you use for your site? Which could you not live without?


  1. then insert your footnote in double brackets 

  2. seriously, check out the footnote plugin at least 

The Worst Movie I've Seen This Year

Unfortunately I have two movies that spring to mind when I was given this suggestion:

Review the worst movie you’ve seen this year.

The first is The Ugly Truth with Whatserface and That Bloke who always seem to be in these awful movies. Normally I would have steered clear of something like this1, but occasionally I have to watch a romantic comedy so that my wife will keep watching SciFi with me.

Bleh

What a dreadful movie. I’m not sure there’s much to be said beyond that.

The second was Surrogates with Bruce Willis. I had heard it wasn’t fantastic, but the idea behind it intrigued me: what if everyone lived their lives virtually through robot simulacrum2?

Bruce Willis: Bored.

The movie’s conceit is ridiculous in execution though, with almost the entire world having chosen to live in little pods that feed sensory input from their virtual bodies back to them. I cannot imagine anyone but the elite and a select few ever going for it. The movie world is one where doctors no longer espouse the benefits of sunlight or fresh air, where muscles don’t atrophy from under-use, and the technology is so good that no one misses reality.

Except Bruce Willis of course.

He has that same sort of bemused look he has in every film. Except in this one it doesn’t suit. I also recently re-watched 12 Monkeys and the man can act, but when the script is bad, he just spends the entire film with a little half-smirk like he knows something the director doesn’t. Well his character hates his virtual life for some reason. He’s a cop put on the trail of a man with technology to kill someone through the surrogate. There’s all sorts of interesting questions that this raises3, but none of them are really explored or adequately covered.

Which is the essence of this film really. The premise is interesting, but the execution is flawed. About half way in the movie starts showing all its cards until there are no surprises by the end. None of the characters are “real”, so you don’t care about them in any way. The technology is so magical you just cannot believe any of it.

The final indication that this was not a good film came about 2 minutes after Bruce Willis saved the entire planet4 and my wife woke up. Oh how I envied her.

Cheers Zombie_Plan. Hope it was good for you too…


  1. 14% on the tomatometer! 

  2. thanks P.K. Dick for that word! 

  3. one of which is WFT? 

  4. from themselves… 

Twitter Sucks

Twitter sucks.

It feels good to finally get that off my chest.

Not the users, mind you. I’ve met some great people through Twitter. Bloggers, programmers, web designers, a lot of fellow Adelaidians. All of them excel at what they do, go out of their way to try new things, and generally win at life.

But Twitter sucks.

Not the technology either. Mostly. FSM knows I’ve griped and bitched about how Friendfeed put it to shame technologically, and in the end it didn’t matter. Twitter does what it does well. No, that’s not why it sucks.

Twitter sucks for the same reason they ALL suck. The same reason Friendfeed sucks, Facebook sucks, Cliqset, Status.net, Google Reader and now Buzz all suck.

Because I don’t get them.

I mean, I know why they exist. I enjoyed throwing out tweets here and there. I like connecting with friends and new people. I understand that they’re about sharing what you know and find, and uncovering new stuff.

But they just don’t gel with me.

They take time. Energy. Dedication. They require you to put in thought about what your friends might like to read. You need to watch what you say about your workmates and avoid sounding stupid. I self censor so much all my input comes out trite and uninteresting, and when my internal censor fails I come off self absorbed.

And I can’t keep up.

In the period of time I was tweeting the most, I was also working the least. Work sucked, and that didn’t help, but I just wasn’t as focussed as I should have been.1


  1. This post was originally written back in 2010 and was never published because I think I recognised it was unhelpful whining. I’m publishing it now because it was where my head was in those days 

To @brizzly @tweetie @seesmic @echofon: Add this feature and I will have your babies.

An example of my proposal

An example of my proposal

I don’t want a separate app where I have to gather all my friends and influencers in one place all over again - I have that in Twitter.

What I want from you is a way to flag a user (secretly) as someone whose opinion has aligned with mine in the past, so that when they say “I love this new movie”, I’ll be reasonably certain that I will too. And if I could flag someone’s opinion as wrong1 most of the time, then I will know that when they say “I love this song”, not to bother clicking through to it. It might mean that some of the users in my stream have slightly darker or lighter updates so I can tell at a glance which ones I’ve flagged as trustworthy or mostly wrong.

Heck, just being able to easily see that someone is in a “trusted” private Twitter list with a glance at my main stream would be double handy. Do that.

Thank you for listening. If you do this, you will win the world.

PS. to all the people I follow: I’m not talking about any of you. I think all of you have fantastic taste. It’s those oter people I worry about…


  1. that’s what we’re all thinking right? 

Astro Boy (movie review)

{{< youtube W5zJZQjP094 >}}

Watch the Astro Boy trailer on Youtube

Not the same Astro Boy of previous incarnations. Not at all challenging or interesting.

I was a fan of the 80’s Astro Boy series, which I’ve begun watching again as a adult. I haven’t ever read the original manga though which I’m sad about. I am a big fan of the robot boy with the rocket legs and the machine-gun butt though so I was stoked to get to see this new CG animated movie version.

I was a little disappointed. It’s a good movie, but it feels like it lost it’s edginess. The original cartoon was creepy at times - a bit dark and disturbing. Maybe things don’t creep me out like they did when I was younger but this felt sugary-sweet and a little to happy. The music was cheesy kid-move fare, and the plot was wrapped up so happily I thought I was going to puke.

Yes it’s a kids movie. Yes it wasn’t pitched at me. But the original cartoon had genuine moments of despair and heartbreak for the characters. Why the makers of this thought that kids couldn’t handle some of those concepts now is beyond me.

The whole thing was a bit too Dreamworks-esque. It borrowed ideas and elements from so many other animated movies (and relied way too much on the so-scared-I-peed-myself gag) it ended up uninspired and dull, instead of exciting and fresh like Astro Boy was when I was a kid.

It’s a standard kids movie: harmless and fun. But it’s not the same Astro Boy of previous incarnations, and it’s not at all challenging or interesting.

This rates 2.0 stars ★★☆☆☆

A New Vocabulary

Online communication fraught with peril. An innocent conversation with a friend can turn nasty in seconds with the slip of misplaced word. Umpteen times this week I have put my foot in my mouth, or written something only to spend the rest of the day worrying if what I wrote might have offended someone. Written communication has never been so difficult. Why has it gotten harder, the more ways we have to communicate?

Words 'o the Day

Words 'o the Day by jblyberg

Of course everyone knows that written communication is less effective at conveying emotion and subtleties of meaning than face-to-face conversations do. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a grimace and a hug, I’d say are worth far more. But online is how many of us choose to interact these days (it’s quicker and lets you continue to do other things while chatting) for better or worse, and we need a way to communicate that puts across our full meaning.

I hate writing. Not because I’m particularly bad at it,1 but because once I start I feel the need to qualify everything I say with insight to show that I am not as dumb as my words would make me seem. I do it face to face too (which I suspect might be even more painful for the receiver than my written parentheses) because I can’t bear the thought of someone thinking I haven’t thought about what I’m saying enough to see the other side. When I write it though, it increases the effort I have to put in to produce something I’m happy with, and litters my writing with brackets and footnotes. If I’m not prepared to put that sort of effort in I just don’t write.

I’m kinda feeling the same way about Twitter too. Now with 140 characters, it might seem I shouldn’t have that problem, but the limit is exactly what make me nervous about tweeting. With so few words, how can anyone possibly make themselves completely understood? Most of the time it’s not a real issue, as what I say is fairly innocuous, but occasionally the limit can really hack meaning from your words and leave you with something that is drastically misinterpreted.

Personal chat is even worse. You think you have more scope to make yourself understood, but it’s much more immediate and often words come out, when you really should have thought about it more. It also gives you the illusion of knowing someone better than you actually do, so something you might say face to face with someone you know well sounds rude or mean in a chat.

Online communication has rendered my entire vocabulary meaningless in this new context. Words and their equivalent emotions are often entirely different online. We add emoticons and abbreviations such as LOL that we wouldn’t use in real life.2 My favourite emoticon is colon-p ( :P ) which is my get-out-of-jail-free card for saying something that might be taken badly without it. It really is a cheap cop-out when a re-write or complete scrapping of the text might be a better option. I hate myself for using LOL and :D as I’m pretty sure my mother “taught me better than that”.

But the alternative is thinking everything through too much. and like I’ve said that doesn’t make me write better, it makes me not write. I had to just write this post, or risk never seeing it written, so you’ll forgive it’s slapdash nature.3

I would like to develop my online vocabulary. I’m not sure what that entails though. I suspect using Twitter has helped, but I’m still coming up short when it comes to making myself understood. Perhaps it will just take time, like learning any new language or culture. Perhaps I will never master it.

How has your vocabulary changed due to online communication?


  1. although this is not a stunning example 

  2. you’re laughing out loud to my crack about cheese? Really? REALLY? 

  3. this is why I don’t do uni - I hate essays 

"Web Guys"vs "Real Programmers"

Michael J. Braude wrote a post on why he’ll never be a “web guy”. The gist being, the annoyances of writing for the web are not the sort of challenges he wants to tackle as a programmer.

Then Jeff Atwood gave his two cents on why programming for the web is where it’s at — it’s fast, it gets seen by more people, and more and more great apps are being made on the web.

I’m sure Michael has a point. I think the way he said it got up Jeff’s nose a little (it certainly got up mine), but it’s valid. For some, the web just seems simple and trite. My lecturer thinks like this I suspect. I also agree with Jeff that it’s somewhat myopic — if you dismiss web apps, you dismiss a lot of clever, well written programs right out of the gate.

The debate got me thinking about why I’m studying programming. I’m a web guy, but not even “smart enough” to “throw an ASP.NET webpage together”. But I see the innovation in web pages. I also see how useful these technologies will be moving forward. While Michael is coding apps that will work on one type of system sitting on someone’s desk, programmers like Jeff are making universally accessible programs that are instantly available to anyone with access to the internet. I could learn to regurgitate borrowed code in half-arsed web pages and validate Michael’s argument, but I’d rather learn to do it properly.

When I was leaving high school and thinking about what to study, the web was just starting to become mainstream. One teacher I got advice from had been programming years earlier and painted a picture of a world of drudgery, typing pre-written code without chance for innovation or personal expression. It was not a nice picture. I probably let myself be swayed by it too much I’m sad to say now.

What I discovered in the years after, is how exciting the world of web programming can be. Instead of being a small cog in a giant programming machine, a web programmer can be a vital part of a small team who’s work can be seen instantly. Of course I know now the same can be said of non-web programming, but the web was what opened my eyes.

So I’m going back to study to do something I should have done all along. And I’m going so I can understand: “virtual methods, pointers, references, garbage collection, finalizers, pass-by-reference vs. pass-by-value, virtual C++ destructors, or the differences between C# structs and classes”. And then I’m going to use that knowledge to make the best web programs I can make. Maybe along the way I’ll learn enough that web programming seems trite to me too, but I’m not expecting to. I agree with Jeff, and strongly believe good web apps are only going to become more important.

I want a slice of that action.

Some Uncomfortable Truths

  1. That show you like? Unless it involves people being voted off every week, it won’t be on next season.

  2. We know it took you a half an hour to ‘mess up’ your hair this morning.

  3. Unless you already work for NASA, right now, today - you’re never going to be an Astronaut.

  4. No one reads your blog1.

  5. Putting in an energy saving bulb isn’t going to offset your pollution while you’re CEO of an oil company.

  6. There is no way all 415 of them are actually your friends.

  7. Sometimes in the night, when it does get a little lonely, I reach over and touch it. Then it doesn’t feel so lonely anymore2.

  8. If you don’t like your job, SUCK IT UP! A lot of people hate their jobs but do it anyway. Or alternatively, find a better job that makes you feel more fulfilled. Whatever suits your circumstances.

  9. Your Asian tattoo does not - I repeat DOES NOT - make you seem deep. However, your barbed wire tattoo does succeed in making you look like a dick.

  10. You probably aren’t as ugly as you think you are. Unless you’re very attractive and know it. In that case it’s likely that you’re a teensy bit less pretty than you like to think.

Special thanks to my co-author Carlynne Nunn. This sucked until she fixed it.


  1. Oh. Fuck 

  2. Sorry, somehow this got mixed in from my top 10 worst movie quotes of all time. 

My "Batman: the Dark Knight" review in 700 characters or less

I loved the Dark Knight. It was fun, but it was also dark and difficult to watch. The film was experimental (for a comic book movie) that was a contrast to the big loud and also terrific Iron Man a couple of months ago.

The Joker’s scruffy and grungy make-up
        reflect…

Image via Wikipedia

And as for Heath Ledger’s Joker, I present my Twitter comments from soon after seeing the film:

Went to see ‘Dark Knight’ last night. I’m not sure I even want to
        leave the house any more. Not while that mad fucker is still out
        there.

Seriously, he’s one scary mofo. I don’t want to be Batman anymore.