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'Minnesota teen Jeffrey Lee Parsons got a year and half for releasing a Blaster variant. The lightweight sentence was due, said the judge, to the parents' neglect. Quoting the judge: 'It's not a healthy thing to lock yourself in a room and create your own reality.'(/. story)
I've been "un-wired" these days.
The holidays catalyzed a time of retreat and reflection, in which I have hardly been able to bring myself to read my email (shocking!). If you know me and I seem to have disappeared for good, I haven't. I simply couldn't fight the natural slowdown that was occurring. In it, almost despite myself, I found once again that nourishment and richness, different from the kind I enjoy through this global thought matrix where we have likely met.
I am compelled to drink from this well. And I've been drinking in large gulps, 'cause I don't know how long it'll be here, in all its delicious multiplicity of states, from blissful to grim to flat-out incomprehensible.
The echoes and scent of Life Passing By.
The excitement and toil of Life Moving On.
How can I even try to sum up everything that happened this year? Hell, why should I bother? What should I have to say about it? We can all look around, above, below and within [for] ourselves. Instead, I will descend into the confused magma of Right Now, and lend my most careful ear to its unspecified gurgling, the barrage of incoherent signals that boggles the mind. I seem to remember there's something to hear, somewhere in there... maybe a melody or two. A soothing rhyme. Or maybe the kind of news that never change, yet always remain "news".
With any luck, I'll find a round-trip ticket that doesn't cost me Everything.
After all, I am not too particular about my lodgings and I don't care about travelling in first class. What matters is taking the Trip. So don't put that off when you get the chance. I won't, and I hope to See You There.
With any luck, I'll be back in One Piece. And then what?
In the spirit of Mark Pauline and Monte Cazazza, but with a markedly geeky twist:
'Have you ever loaded a faulty CD into a high speed (30X or higher) CD-ROM player, heard it spin up to incredible speeds, rattling and whining, and thought to yourself: "this thing is going to explode"? When CDs came out they were heralded as the solution for the need for high storage-high speed information devices, transferring data at a whopping 150kb/s, but like all technologies, 1x CD players quickly became obsolete as the need for higher and higher transfer rates pushed for faster players, and, with them, higher rotational speeds. As we advance into the 21st century CD players are reaching the ultimate speed limit: we are getting to the point where the CD player simply can not spin the CD any faster or else the CD will literally fly apart.
On the interests of the advancement of high speed computing PowerLabs brings to you: "THE ULTIMATE CD SPEED LIMIT!" (Sam Barros' PowerLabs article)
A chance encounter on IRC brought to my knowledge this cool project -- in so many words: Linux, culture, medialabs and community in the slums of New Delhi (and with local "troubled youths"). The website is a good read, with a lot of well-written info and samples of some of the media projects coming out of the experiment, It's an inspiring example of a social project enabled by and based on Free Software.
'The Ankur/Sarai Cybermohalla Project is an experimental collaborative initiative for the creation of nodes of popular digital culture in Delhi between Ankur, a Delhi based NGO and Sarai, the New Media & Urban Culture Programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
The word Cybermohalla, suggests a hybrid location, which has the open-endedness of cyberspace, qualified by the local specifities and intimacy of a mohalla or a dense urban neighbourhood.' (Link)