I just saw Lady in the Water and then An Inconvinient Truth–two amazing films.
After seeing Lady in the Water, I was left with the idea that the most powerful films these days are those that tell stories of people finding inspiration, finding joy and youth, truth beyond the benality of the life we know–finding interconnectedness in all things and being able to die knowing that life is still larger and more mystical than we may ever know. But these films that tell of characters achieving enlightenment only serve to inpspire the viewers to dream of enlightenment rather than take action to create enlightenment.
Just then, an Inconvienient Truth spun a different, yet equally inspiring web. Arguments, counter arguments and solutions to current turmoil, world crisis, pain and triumph. No magic, no mystery, just facts. Explosive and frightening, yet managable if people want to take action, the problems seemed fierce and overwhelming, then simple.

See both of these movies, and go to http://www.climatecrisis.net.

I dreamed that my friend Deric died of cancer. I heard about it on the web. Nobody ever told me he had cancer but everyone else seemed to know. Everyone in Arcata threw him a wake but I was only able to watch it over online streaming media.
Everyone was there.
Our high school English teacher, Mr. Edwards was cracking odd jokes.
Some of the jocks from our school had become transvestites and were talking about how much they loved him.
Countless girls swooned by his memory.

And then the webcast ended and a banner popped up, advertising that the wake was happening on the 4th of July, the day after tomorrow.

I called in to work and drove down to CA. The website said there were job opportunities at the wake. People were going to setup booths and street performers would have a go at their trades.

I didn’t have a plan but I brought my accordion.

On my way down, I was stopped by a cop. He hassled me for a while but had no reason to arrest me. I told him I wanted to make a complaint about my detention. Luckily, there were cop comment stations every hundred meters for situations as common as this. The cop followed me to fill out his side of the story. He had a carbon copy form of which I was to take the messy page. In a stack of comment cards, I tried to find one with his name on it but they all had the name of one particular cop whom somehow we both knew. The files were dated all the way back to 1932, which we found odd since the officer in question was in his mid-twenties. The offending cop shrugged at me and crossed out the other officer’s name. As I was filling out a report, I noticed a couple of kids spraying graffiti just a few meters away. The cop didn’t notice as I tried to distract him with lame conversation about sports and weather (neither about which I knew anything).

You can’t put your own government on trial when the government controls the information necessary to convict. If a private company had tapped the phones of millions of Americans, we could demand the records be turned over to the court and they would have to comply. However, since the NSA did it, they can say that revealing the information would be a danger to national security and therefore should be dropped. That’s just total BS. What can the government NOT get away with?

Here’s a link to the story on CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/05/10/domestic.spying.ap/index.html
And here’s a link to a story on Wired:
http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,70878-0.html?tw=rss.index

I suggest everyone use encryption all the time. You never know what might get you put on a black list or turned into a terrorist ten years from now. It happened to a lot of people durring the red scare and it happened to a lot of people during the terrorism scare.

For phone calls, Skype uses encryption for voice and chat.

Get GPG or PGP and make yourself a keypair to send encrypted emails (those are also monitored by the NSA).
If you don’t know anything about email encryption, you can read a little tutorial I wrote:

http://pgp.shadowpuppet.net

I finally put up the pix I took at Mind Camp 2.0. You’ll have to excuse my archaic photo viewer and the fact that I’m not a photographer:

Seattle Mind Camp Spoils.

Some other people took some really awesome pictures and posted them on Flickr

This rocks! I’m at MindCamp 2.0. I just ate dinner, which was surprisingly delightful (salmon, chicken skewers, delicate desserts, etc…). I’m on a waiting list to get what looks like a pretty damn good massage. And to top it all, I’ve spent the day engaged in stimulating conversations with the best minds in Seattle. Here’s a picture from the dinner table:

I just hacked out a little exploit/”proof of concept” for automatically bookmarking a site on ma.gnolia without the user noticing. This is a very simple hack, based on prefetching a link to a bookmarklet. If you are using Firefox or any other browser that uses prefetching (and you have a ma.gnolia account). check it out. You’ve just bookmarked this site :)

This technique can be used on any other site that allows a link to add information to a users account without further user interaction. I can think of several fixes for this but:

• Image verification
• Passphrase verification
• Simply any further interaction of any kind from the processing page.

I’m sure you can come up with countless more fixes… It’s just not safe to allow someone to so easily add information to an account. Del.icio.us has a better way of doing it. Although not as transparent and seemless, it requires the user to hit ‘save’ before adding the bookmark. Granted this too could be bypassed by opening the del.icio.us URL in a new window and then using javascript to submit the form within that window, then close the window (all of which could be done in a matter of miliseconds–before the user could see what was happening).

I’m all for web 2.0 but we must be careful not to fall into huge security traps while we build these cool sites. Ma.gnolia.com is still pretty damn cool.
If you hate this site, feel free to delete it from your ma.gnolia account :)

Lena’s mother and sister just got back from China–and what did they bring me? Only the coolest foriegn gift possible!

It’s a windup Chairman Mao wristwatch. His hand waves as the seconds tick by. It’s awesome!

The worst part about 9 hour coding binges is staying up until 3am. Normally, staying up late is no problem. However, after that much straight coding, the human brain changes. Neurons are excited and race around making it impossible to focus on sleep. The moment the eyes are shut, the brain realizes it’s free to think about everything else in the world–in code. Then there is the sudden realization that even though the brain is fervently alive with activity, the brain matter itself is being pushed around by large angry Frenchmen who keep shouting “hoagh, hoagh, hoagh” in a thick, nasel accent–right at the point above the ear.

Then, of course, hunger sets in.

What to do…. Eat? sleep? Can’t really move anyway. Just sit and wait for the Frenchmen to go away.

This spam was kind. No advertisements, no attachments, no porn images–just this:

I saw V for Vendetta again today.
The first time I saw it, I loved it.
The second time, it was even better.
I cannot count how many times I had to stiffle tears of triumphant rebellious joy.
I will buy this DVD when it comes out. That should say something to people who know me about how damn good this film is.
Also, I was able to find the artist of the song played on the credits (the only song that isn’t on the official soundtrack–even though it rules).

You can hear a sample of this song on Ethan Stoller’s mySpace site.
He’s offering a 99 cent download of the “speechless” version, which is pretty cool–but he needs to have the version from V with all the cool political activism speeches. That was tight.