blackrimglasses.com

I don’t feel like blogging much about Katrina, but all I can say is that what is happening is indicative of the incompetence of the current administration. To claim that this was a “surprise” is ridiculous. FEMA had a drill last year about this very situation. Papers in journals back in 1994 predicted EXACTLY what would happen.

I feel ashamed to be in a country under this supposed “leader.”

Oh, and Cheny is on vacation, Rice is enjoying 5th avenue shopping and tennis with celebrities. Is it any wonder this country is a laughing stock internationally?

Ultimately Bush’s legacy will be:

2,752 dead on 9/11
1,885 dead in Iraq
Supposedly, up to 10,000 dead in New Orleans

So, 15,000 deaths because his administration ignored intelligence, fought a needless war and ignored the warnings from FEMA, NOAA and others about what could happen in New Orleans.

Bush and his gang of thugs should be forced to meet each and every family effected face to face and explain why they were and are vacationing while this is happening, why it took three days to get help to New Orleans, why they were sent to Iraq for “weapons of mass destruction”, why intelligence was ignored leading up to 9/11.

A good article about funding cuts to FEMA, Army Corps of Engineers and Lousiana by Bush

It’s early.

Actually, I, like Ethan, require massive amounts of caffeine to get my day going. I think this is actually how Ethan and I became friends…through our mutual need of caffeine before a class we shared a few years ago. I, unlike Ethan however, have no problem finding my sources of caffeine. This is Manhattan and there are actually 5 Starbucks within a 4 block radius of my place of employment…at least 5 coffee stands, and countless holes in the wall, but I digress…

This morning I found myself at one of the 2 Starbucks on Astor Place. . . And I am doing the milk thing, when this Hispanic guy runs up to an Asian couple and grabs the guy on the arm. In a yelled whisper he starts talking about them drawing too much attention to themselves in the subway for laughing about something….and then gets into this rant about how he gave them the best deal on parts and that if they want to keep doing business with him they have to mind their behavior. What could be so secret? My inner gossip was intrigued and so I lingered pondering the sugar selection.

Turns out this trio is making hacked PlayStations. . . I thought it was hilarious that they were meeting up in Starbucks as a place to yell at each other about their “covert” operation.

Leaving Starbucks, I walk to work and what is one of the newest articles in my Wired RSS feed: Counterfit PlayStations in NYC.

News in your face! Oh, that is one reason I love this city.

I knew something was up today, when, on the way into work, I was thwarted from making a left into the Burger King where I customarily get my diet coke. They were doing construction, and hence the right lane leading into the drive was blocked. I thought to myself, “this indeed is strange,” while I made a u-turn and proceeded to try to enter from the opposite direction.

I was thwarted again. I need the diet coke. It is 44 oz of Wake the Fuck Up You Asshole. Over two pounds of pure, liquid kick in the nuts to get going. I was desperate.

I make my way to Burbank, get off at Buena Vista and think: must find soda.

Down Riverside I go, past Bob’s Bigboy, past Warner Bros. Studios. I’m in Reseda I think when I find a McDonalds. Nevermind the stupid woman blocking the drive through entrance. She was dealt with. Diet coke. My mouth. Liquid alarm clock.

All is well.

Work was fine. The standard things that go wrong did go wrong, including my programmer being out, a hurried staff meeting, a music star who should not be associated with anythign equine. Usual stuff. And then….

The Internet goes down.

I’ve been in a few companies in my life that were dependent either on the nascent Internet or the established Internet for their business. Whenever that network goes down (which it did with impunity and frequency in the nascent days, circa 1995-1997), the reaction is always in a similar format:

1) Questioning: is it just me? Is it just this site? Is it my computer? I shall try another site. Wait, AIM is down too, mail is down. Maybe if I restart?

2) Verification: I shall call up an office mate, and see if their Internet is down. It is? Maybe the entire Internet is having problems, so I will now call up my husband/wife/girlfriend/dog/friend to see if they can get to any web pages.

3) Panic: Oh my god, what if our entire website and most importantly, all the stores are down! Begin urgent calls to loved ones to make sure profit generation mechanisms are still operational. Commence running through halls, throwing furniture, crying and smashing into walls.

4) Impatience: A call to the helpdesk. The Internet might be down until tomorow?

5) Acceptance: Well, nothing I can do about it, oh well. Begin playing computer game.

6) Escapism: Since my job depends on the Internet, I might as well go into the halls and go chat with people.

7) Regression: Fuck this. If the Internet is down, I might as well go home!

Trepadation: I don’t want to be the first one to leave, so I’ll wait until I see someone else do it.

9) Caution: waiting.

10) Moment of Inertia: Someone is leaving! I’m out of here now.

11a) Resolution (a): I am home, I have Internet, life is good. I shall pet my puppy.

11b) Resolution (b): I am nearly out the door, and the Internet comes back up. Sheepishly make way back to office and pretend I was filing things the whole time.

Care to guess what happened today? Yes! It was 11b.

It’s a very interesting situation I find myself in. But all told not an unfortunate one. I have a steady job and a good life, but now that I’m settled into version 3.0 of both I’m finding myself restless again. The situation is thus: I finished school June 20th. It took me a month or so to get used to working in the corporate world again (if you can call where I work “corporate,” but never-mind that), and now that I am, I’m finding myself wanting to do more than watch TV when I get home.

Hence the changes.

Blackrimglasses.com as a blog will be replaced by blackrimglasses.com the project. It will be a cool project. Most of you whom I know that are interested in helping have been contacted.

However, if you are reading this and you a) like music, b) like going to shows, c) like the Interweb and/or d) know Ruby on Rails, CSS or Javascript, do get in touch with me by leaving a comment.

That being said.

I’m getting more into business and the whole “web 2.0″ type of situation and was thinking about exactly what this Web 2.0 thing actually is. I think what it amounts to is a realization of the intrinisc qualities of the web, and figuring out that capitalization from those core values and properties is not done through customer limitation, fragmentation or diffusion of a centralized goal.

In the Internet 1.0 boom, the goal was to productize an existing concept in an online space, but then in the second phase diffuse the concept through multiple revenue streams in the hope that one stuck. I dealt with enough companies who did this, who figured that because the web provided no barrier to entry on any morphology of the medium that any company could be both X and Y at the same time, where X and Y are substituted by radically disparate ideas.

It was a bad idea.

Web 2.0 means doing one thing really well, and allowing users to do it better given adequate access to the thing you did well in the first place. It is, for lack of a better term, decentered cybernetics as a manifested through the interface between disparate ideologies, methods, wants and needs. Cybernetics is essentially feedback between systems that results in either positive or negative movement toward a desired end goal. It is the state of communication between probabalistic and deterministic entities that balances itself out in such a way that the end goal is not only met, but met with expectations intact.

Decentered cybernetics moves the control structures out of a strict hierarchy and allows the feedback to transpire in a more diffused manner. It is essentially how folksonomies work, through balancing between signal and noise, but not with any mechanistic constraints, just constraints based on usage. We see this in other Web 2.0 systems, in which participatory models are dependent on the modification of instrinsic behavior by both the filtering of the machines, and the resonance of that filtering on how people interact through the machines with each other.

Clasical cybernetics is the restriction of all possible outcomes save for one. Decentered cybernetics is the diffusion of those restrictions into every point of intersection in the cybernetic system, whether human to human or machine to human or machine to machine. Web 2.0 is dependent on such decentered cyberntics in that all intersection points are causally linked through microlevel causality rather than a determinent end goal. There is no “end” or “beginning” to any of these sites, and thus the restriction to singularity does not exist. Hiearchy no longer matters, and neither does the predeliction of hierarchy to be dependent on a root.

Yes, this does sound like rhizomes.

So Web 2.0 is decentered cybernetics in action. If we look at any of the examples and paradigms in this movement, we find this everywhere.

My intention right now is to impose this notion on my dayjob, and develop this notion on my own through various other projects, one of which will manifest itself here, and one of which willl hopefully not be mine for much longer.

When I was at my previous employer, I spoke of this, they thought I was crazy. And maybe I am.

“Gone with the Wind was a Civil War movie?” – BlackRimWife

It seems that everyone in town has already read the new Harry Potter book. Not that it isn’t something that can’t be finished in a day, in fact, I read the first three sitting idly with a bashed-up kneecap and nothing else better to do. However, I am still working on book 5 and have been since the day that it came out. Everytime I am in the middle of the book, I see another book that looks just as interesting or even more interesting and starting reading it, too. I get frustrated at my pace of reading the books and the lack of plot revelations, then give up on both. Why do I do this? Because it is a right afforded to me as a citizen of the United States. That, and I own more books than the local branch of the public library, and every single one of them is tempting (even A.T. Mahan’s book concerning the influence of naval power upon history). With the advent of the DVD and its extras that nobody watches, tivo, and violent video games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, I don’t really see how anyone gets anything done. Sure you can cop out and become a Buddhist monk or finish a graduate degree, but really, who wants to do all that? These are trying times, and I guess I am not trying hard enough. Now back to see whether or not Harry Potter becomes a scientologist and his friend Ron Weasel knocks up his friend Harmony.

I am trying to come up with a thesis these days… well, brainstorming mine. This means I need to be really observant about life. I came to the following conclusions:

1. You know when people were saying night night don’t let the bed bugs bite, they really meant roaches and those people lived in NYC.

2. What happened to the food chain? (inspired by this picture from Sean, a fellow ITPer)

3. Some people don’t like to own possessions. I am one of these people, the opposite of the “keeper” type. I like to consider myself a person who can just pack up and move where I feel like, so I have a hard time buying things that I might have to take with me. Actually my whole room could be packaged and fit into a car. My mattress rolls up, my bed comes apart, my desk seperates… OK so you get that concept. I would just like to share with you how long it actually took me to buy furniture though and how I avoid it.

Here is an example. I moved into my newest dwelling in May. I didn’t own any furniture… no bed, desk, etc. I owned a few dishes, a lamp, my sleeping bag, wardrobe, and books. OK so I bought a desk… a marvel at thirty dollar to finish my finals with, BUT I couldn’t bring myself to buy a chair. Since I was sleeping on the floor in my sleeping bag and not using any sheets or blankets I just used the box that held these items for a chair.

Sometime in July, my mom asks me if I have a bed yet. She has been talking with Grandma and apparently they have figured out that they haven’t heard me speak of furniture in a while or at all for that matter. I tell them I haven’t gotten around to buying it…and to come to the general conclusion of my living situation now… As of last week, I am the proud owner of a bed and mattress. My desk chair I borrowed, bookcase is still old boxes, and my mom mailed me a fan to cool myself with.