Life is grand

Just a note but Fiona and I will be spending 3 days at Brook Lodge in Wicklow. No laptop so I won’t be online. See you on Thursday.

It’s a nice idea, and I think a lot of home users would choose a safer, if more limited, online experience.

They sure would but they would sure be wrong in doing so. The problem being that once you go down the safe route you lose power to change. There is no recourse in a safe zone. A safe zone is patrolled, monitored and safety is enforced not by the citizens but by the walls and the builders of the walls. The builders of the walls are given power to choose for you and once they have that power it takes, in most cases, a violent revolution to take their power away.

In the red/green model proposed though you can exit the safe zone whenever you want.

A safe zone however renders you unable to survive in an unsafe zone. You lose the skills and perspective you have to have in a dangerous zone. So when the safe zone crumbles or is overthrown the people inside are left incapable of surviving.

And once you have spent enough time in the safe zone you may have the option to go to the unsafe zone but you won’t do it. You know you will get creamed in the red zone so you cower in apparent safety in the green zone. The freedoms you used to have are gone and you cannot choose anymore.

Most people though will grow frustrated by a safe zone quickly enough to switch to the red zone and remain there. This is what is happening with Microsoft Windows Vista and UAC. Most people turn it off. They go from safe and restricted to unsafe but free. They get hassled, they have security breaches and they curse at Windows but they hate UAC even more and they battle on.

Until we come up with a better idea than red and green we just have to battle on. Just don’t choose green, you’ll regret it and will be powerless to change.

The Economist has a break-down of smoking by country. Greece is at the top with 3000 ciggies per year per person with India at the bottom at less than 100 per person per year.

Here is my in-depth, PC-free analysis of the results:
Greece (3000): You’d rather smell the fish I gutted this morning?
Ukraine (2500): I’ve got bigger problems e.g. Chernobyl.
Slovenia (2500): It is our capitalistic right to smoke!
Russia (2000): You’d rather I drank stolichnaya?
Spain (2000): It’s either the bulls or the smokes.
Japan (2000): Raw, fermented eel taste better after 10 smokes.
Lebanon (1500): A gift of secondary smoke for our neighbors down South.
South Korea (1500): You’d smoke too with our nuclear-happy neighbours up North.
China (1500): The Chairman never said nothing about smoking.
United States (1000): Yippee kay ya mother…
Cuba (1000): One more box and my cigarette boat is complete! Miami here I come!
France (500): I do it to spite you, English prick!
Britain (500): Can’t let those frogs beat us at yet another thing eh!
Brazil (500): All this sex…
South Africa (500): It’s like a portable braai.
India (100): Maybe I come back as a vending machine.

Kids. Don’t smoke. Cheaper ways of killing yourself.

If you are looking for web-dev work in the South East of Ireland then check out a senior and junior positions with FeedHenry, the company I work for.

Nothing was likely to change until we healed the “split between what we think and what we do.

Wendell Berry, 30 years ago talking about environmental problems and peoples attitudes towards them. Fascinating that a man spoke before I was born on today’s issues that people think of as only being recent.

Michael Pollan has an interesting article on why we should even attempt to “go green” when in the face of it our actions may be little better than betting on a horse.

I am an optimist who would like a better, sustainable world. I want to be more independent from the energy grid and the food production and transport system. But as Wendell points out there is a gulf between what we think and what we do. A lot of the push-back seems to come from social norms and desires. The nice house, the nice car, the nice TV and, as I am about to become a father, the completely irrational guilt of not doing buying everything your child needs wants. I have a pregnant girlfriend that I want to keep comfortable and safe.

Saving the planet is going to involve a lot of arguing with the people around me.

And with myself. I’d love a Playstation 3 about now, nearly bought one on the weekend. Yet I want to cut my carbon footprint. One or the other has to give.

Another thing is that my family lives back in South Africa. That is a long, expensive flight. How do I tell my mom I’m not going to see her every year or two because it is bad for the planet? How do I say she may not see her first grandchild for years because the world is falling apart and I have to do my bit?

Then you get onto energy independence; solar and wind. I’ll take the initial hit but what happens in 5 years time when they need to be replaced? Turbines wear out, storms and accidents break solar panels. There is a lot of glass, plastic and silicon in solar and wind generators. Glass takes heat to shape which comes from coal power plants. Plastic comes from petroleum (oil.) God knows what is involved in getting silicon into solar panels.

Plus the various parts of a wind turbine aren’t something I know how to maintain never-mind build. They have to come from somewhere, probably China.

Some of the solution to that involves talking to the people around me. A few co-workers are pretty handy with hardware. But I’ll have to break some social norms to get their help.

Local communities are going to have to come back in a strong way for us to build a sustainable world. I can’t rely on cheap labour and manufacturing in India anymore.

As for food, I’m getting there. Meat is going to be hard to cut but I’ll cut it down, if not out. Vegetables I am working on growing myself with some help from composting all that kitchen waste. Fruit will be harder in Ireland but some recycled packaging for a greenhouse might do the trick. Other things I’ll just have to wean out completely. How the heck do I get local brown sugar for instance? The sugar industry in Ireland went bang awhile back.

None of this takes into account some other important parts of life that we’d do well to be independently capable of; water, waste disposal, medicine, education, communication.

It is a bet. But I’d be happier to go out on the bet than having done nothing.

Before The West Wing came along I thought TV was entertaining but that the silver screen was king. TV used to be where b-grade actors, directors, producers and so on went, all hoping to make it into the big time and into a movie. Now you find movie stars working hard in TV shows and a-list directors sweating over an episode a week. For me it was The West Wing that changed it all, introducing a phenomenal mix of writing, production and acting. Aaron Sorkin is a bona-fide genius who chose writing as his outlet.

I was disappointed that The Sopranos came in at #4 with The West Wing at #5 on this Empire top 50 list. Back home in South Africa you were either a West Wing fan or a Sopranos fan. They showed them on the same night at the same time on different channels which meant you had to choose. My dad and I ended up choosing The West Wing, eating every Monday evening’s meal glued to the boob tube as Toby, Josh, CJ and co. gave us a bit of hope about the political system (sadly it is just a TV show.) I’ve watched a bit of The Sopranos on DVD but never really got into it, maybe I should give it another go.

The list is pretty good except for Buffy at #2, what a load of hooey. I’ve met more than a few MSG fans. You know, Sarah Michelle Gellar, more irrationality addictive than MSG itself. It explains why Buffy is at #2 but it doesn’t mean the rest of us not addicted to MSG have to agree with it.

24 is in there and I must thank, or curse, my old friend Brian Delahunty for giving me the first few seasons and not warning me that I’d end up watching 4-6 episodes in an evening, often getting to sleep at 3am on a work night. Truly the most addictive TV show ever. Buffy fans are probably rolling their eyes now.

Other notable shows are Friends (Phoebe and Joey, ace. Ross, you muppet), The X-Files (I want to believe Scully is that sexy in real life), Seinfeld (Cosmo and entrances), Battlestar Galactica (Season 4 is starting well), Blackadder (”so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel”), Futurama (oh Leela), Fawlty Towers (Baaaaasssssil!), Frasier (like a televised theatre show my dad always said), Father Ted (drunk as monkeys), all the Star Treks and finally Monty Python’s Flying Circus (remember the naked girls chasing the guy to his death?)

Lost gets a mention because while I’ve watched a good deal of it I can take it or leave it. The characters were just a wee bit annoying, too precious to get much sympathy from me. Only the former Iraqi torture chap, can’t even remember his name, had the kind of depth I was interested in. That and Lost overplayed its cards. It was a two season show and was forced into many more for commercial reasons. It may have been brilliant had they stuck to the original story arc. As it is it dragged itself well past closing time and into bouncer-just-threw-your-arse-into-the-gutter time.

The Simpsons is in the list too and I do love it. God knows it must be brilliant seeing as Sky show about four episodes every evening right around the time when you get home and are most in the mood to be a couch potato. But if I had to choose one TV show to take to the proverbial desert island then it would have to be The West Wing.

With space running out in the ArcLabs Carriganore building and the new building still a few years away the FeedHenry team have moved to the 1st floor of Confederation House. While I will miss the beautiful location of the Carriganore offices the new offices are a lot better for the team.

FeedHenry also got mentioned in the SiliconRepublic today in relation to Oracle.

It is a funny advert but in fairness completely bollocks. The last time I used the CD/DVD drive on my MacBook Pro was about a month ago to burn something. Before that, about three months. Before that maybe 6 months, probably more. Yet everytime I carry my MacBook Pro around I am carrying around this dead weight. 3 minutes of use in 8 months does not justify a built-in optical drive. I can’t remember the last time I installed anything from a CD. And boy is it noisy and slow when I do use it. Even when I do need it to burn something I have three iMacs and a billion PCs around the office with DVD burners.

As for the USB hub mess I use one USB port a day (for the iPhone) and occasionally need to use a second USB port for a memory card reader. Guess what, a MacBook Air does fine for that usage.

If however you use an optical everyday and have a dozen USB using devices then by all means get a Thinkpad. Different strokes for different folks you know.

Ever since reading Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy I have had an intense dislike for deus ex machina endings. After having read the thousand plus pages of Night’s Dawn I was simply offended by the ending and haven’t read a Peter F. Hamilton book since. io9 has a nice piece on deus ex machina endings though I disagree that The Matrix had one.