Firefox might be faster than Chrome

A while ago, I got fed up with Firefox being so slow, and I switched to Chrome. It had a lot of advantages at the time, including a much cleaner interface. It also let me sync open tabs between home, work and my phone, sort of, which was a big plus. Firefox slipped to the back of my mind.

This past November, however, while I was participating in my second NaNoWriMo, I was using my little Samsung netbook on the train to and from work every day. Occasionally I would get a WiFi-enabled carriage. Signing on requires a click-through EULA, and Firefox was still set as the default browser, so that's where the page opened. I was stunned at how quickly Firefox opened up on this tiny, underpowered machine. Was I too quick to dismiss Firefox from my life? Maybe I should give it another try.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It does have synchronisation now, too.
PPS - I might try it again for a week and see how it feels.

Google Reader being shut down

I've learned recently that Google Reader is shutting down. This is a problem for me, and for an unknown number of other people too, because I mostly experience the web through Reader. The only tabs I usually have open in my browser are Reader, GMail and Facebook, and that's only because Facebook doesn't have a news feed I can subscribe to, as far as I know. Google says there aren't enough users to make Reader worth keeping, though exactly how many is "not enough", they're not saying.

My main problem with server-side programming is illustrated nicely by this whole fiasco. We may love a website or service, and we may even come to rely on it. It may become part of the world's ecosystem for its specific features (Google Reader was used as a sync point for a lot of desktop news readers) but in the end, it costs someone money to run it, and that money has to come from somewhere. As soon as the owner of the service decides that the service isn't worth keeping around, they'll cut it off and that's the end of the story. You can plead with them, sign petitions, complain in public, but at the end of the day its their server and their decision. It's out of your control.

Computers and the internet are meant to empower people, but lately it seems they mostly empower the people who already have power.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm looking into NetVibes and The Old Reader as alternatives.
PPS - The Old Reader is waiting to import my feeds, but the number of people "in queue" ahead of me keeps going up.

Friday Flash Fiction - Making Cuts

With wheir eyes locked over the board room table, Harkin the CEO and Damon the efficency expert faced off, swords drawn.

"This isn't what I called you for," accused the CEO, his voice flat and tense.

"It is," countered the expert. "You just didn't know it would end here."

The CEO circled left, light on his feet, maintaining his stance. "I didn't get here by being weak or slow."

Damon followed around the table, breathing deep and measured. "You didn't stay here by being necessary." For good measure, he made a short jab-feint towards his opponent, more a test than an attack.

Harkin jumped back a step at the feint, then stepped carefully forwards again, still circling. "The company's profits are up 13% this quarter thanks to me! The only reason you're here is to cut costs and make me look even better!"

"That is two reasons. Do you realise that your salary alone is a third of the company's expenses?"

"I earn that salary!"

"How? You haven't introduced a single initiative to the board of directors in a year." Damon gave the table a powerful kick, shifting it a centimetre or two. The CEO went onto his back foot, and Damon had his advantage. He leapt to the middle of the table, two feet at once, and Harkin made the predictable move of slicing low. The expert's feet were already gone, though, as he somersaulted over Harkin's head, landing behind him. He thrust his sword backwards before Harkin could recover from his wild slash and felt it slow as it pierced the other man's body. The CEO fell down, dead. It was a quick death, and would likely make the business section tomorrow.

The company would do fine, thought Damon to himself. The board of directors had been running the place for over a year, without any real help from this buffoon. Without his salary holding them down, they should do even better. He closed the dead man's eyes, lifted him onto the table and arranged his arms to hold his sword like a warrior's tomb. Dignity in death was important for the expert's consultancy.

He sheathed his own sword and collected his fee from the late CEO's assistant, advising her that she should probably seek new employment. She glared at him, hand on the hilt of her dagger, but she did not attack. Harkin didn't mind her anger. He was not in business to make friends, just to make quite literal cuts for efficiency.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wondered once how corporate politics would feel if it involved literal weapons.
PPS - Probably not a lot like this, but I thought it was fun.

Most people are not like you

Most people think most people are just like them. This causes plenty of problems, all unique to the traits you think everyone else possesses. Next time you find yourself wondering why on earth someone would do something that baffles you, try to think of the ways they might be different to you, because they probably are.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For instance, I tend to think most people think very logically and literally.
PPS - And I make that mistake a lot, even when I try not to.

What makes art

In her story called Some Zombie Contingency Plans, Kelly Link makes a point that sometimes people say "this isn't art" when they are looking at something that could obviously serve no other purpose than to be art. I think what people usually mean by "this isn't art" is "this isn't good art" and, quite often, that it was a waste to produce. A waste of the raw materials that went into it, a waste of the alleged artist's time to produce it, a waste of space now that it's done, and a waste of the audience's time to be subjected to it now. And if something is waste, we have different words for that. Junk. Garbage. Rubbish. Landfill. Waste.

It sounds quite harsh to put it that way. If you have attempted to produce art, and have failed, then you have produced garbage. But if it isn't good at being art, then that's just what it is.

So what does it mean to be "good at being art"? That probably depends on whether you ask a postmodernist or not. If you ask the average person, they will tell you that a piece of art is good if it causes the audience to appreciate beauty, to contemplate some notion, or to feel happiness, awe, sadness, or some other "noble" emotion. If you ask an artist, they will probably tell you that their art is good if it conveys what they intended - it makes the audience feel what the artist wants. If you ask a postmodernist, all you will get is the argument that art is art if it makes you feel anything, regardless of what the artist intended, or even if there was no artistic intent. Art is art if it makes you feel a feeling.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Even if that feeling is unpleasant.
PPS - As long as that is the artist's intention.

Harsh Truths

From Cracked.com: 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person.

This is not a nice article. It is harsh and cold and really quite unfriendly. It won't hold your hand and tell you that you're a special unique snowflake that the world doesn't know how to appreciate. It is, however, capable of making you a better person in some very specific ways. It's not what everyone needs to hear. Some people - I'm thinking particularly of the chronically depressed who have actual brain chemistry problems - will not be able to act on its advice without medical help. If, however, you are one of those people who is simply waiting for the world to throw you a parade for being a really nice person, you might want to read it.

It is a deeply pragmatic article, talking about what the world values in you. Hint: it isn't (usually) your positivity or the list of vices you don't have. If your main contribution to the world is the bad things you don't do, then you are on par with a store mannequin. You do nothing, it does nothing. You're both letting the world become worse on its own, and anything you can provide by avoiding doing bad, so can the mannequin.

That quote from the Dalai Lama that says "If you can't do anything good, at least don't do anything evil" is terrible, from this point of view. If you literally can do nothing at all good where you are with what you have, then you also lack imagination. There's a 90-year-old woman at our church who is capable of doing almost nothing but decorating coat hangers to sell and raise money for the church. She does that.

The central lesson of the article is this: the world values what you do, not who you are.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Unless you're riding the momentum of celebrity.
PPS - That is, remaining famous because you're already famous.

Pro vs Anti

I've seen the pro-life side of the abortion debate starting to be referred to as "anti-choice", presumably by the "pro-choice" side. Without picking a side here, just realise that this will mean pro-lifers will get to call the other side "anti-life", which is the worst possible label of all four.

The reason the "pro" labels were adopted is that they summarise each side's positive arguments in a non-offensive way. When you go back to negatives such as "anti-choice", you try to silence the "undesirable" opinions in order to bolster your side against the menace of The Other Guys. It's not the way forward, and it won't settle things at all.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It doesn't seem too common just yet.
PPS - I hope it stays that way.

Friday Flash Fiction - Older

The old man did not wish to be recognised. No matter his precautions, there was still a chance of that though. On his way to the train station he stopped to buy a magazine. Something about cars should be a sufficient disguise.

The train arrived one minute late, just as he remembered from the first time he was here so many years ago. He found the seat he needed, near the centre of the carriage, beside the young familiar face. The young man was reading, near the end of a long novel. He would not look up. The appearance of an old man was nothing remarkable, and the magazine would throw off any hint of recognition.

Between two stations, the old man folded his magazine and braced himself against the seat carefully. That was when the train lurched, jumped off the tracks and toppled over, sliding sideways along the tracks in a cacophony of distressed metal and screaming people.

When the train came to a rest, the old man was unconscious. The young man was injured, and felt like just sitting still, but saw the old man lying across the seats, helpless. Through the smoke and the hot metal, the young man managed to hoist the old man up and carry him the short distance away from the tracks, to relative safety. Just as they cleared the carriage, it started burning and filling up with choking smoke. Another few seconds inside and they would have both been dead.

The old man woke, coughing and spluttering, he grabbed the young man by the arm with surprising strength, and spoke: "When the time comes, remember why you did this." Then he passed out again. He never woke up.

The young man sat staring at the old man for a while, trying to place his face. Was he someone he'd seen on the train before? Maybe he was a distant uncle he'd met at some family gathering.

Then it all started coming together. That nose. The mole to the left of his chin. The scar on his right arm where he - they both - had fallen when nine years old. He shook his head, as if trying to dislodge the impossible idea, but there was no denying it. The old man had saved his life because they were the same person. And when the time came, somehow, he would have to return the favour to himself somehow.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I dug this almost fully formed from my writing ideas file.
PPS - I haven't spent as much time on it as I would have liked, though.

Clarity in communication

Clarity in communication is vital. All my personal and professional experiences hammered home this point for my whole life. You must make sure that you are speaking from common ground when you communicate. Set the rules of vocabulary so that you both agree what you mean when you use those words.

Now my current understanding is this: clarity is 100% your job, and changing someone's mind about their own vocabulary is just about impossible. If someone is calling a kangaroo a tomato for some reason, it won't do you any good to point out that the real name is "kangaroo". You just have to go with it, and mentally file away a mental vocabulary mapping of "tomato = kangaroo" and remember to use it whenever that person is around. You don't always build common ground through discussing the vocabulary, but you can build common ground by swallowing someone else's vocabulary whole, and using that instead of what makes sense to you.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Otherwise, you become that pedantic "actually..." interjector.
PPS - As I so often am, but I'm trying not to be.

Mobile package delivery

What's the mobile phone equivalent for physical package delivery? What I mean is that we have a phone in our pocket that goes everywhere with us. When we get a phone call, it doesn't matter if we are at home, at work, in between or somewhere else entirely, our calls and messages find us and come straight to us. How could you do that with physical packages, turning the postal service into mobile delivery?

Well, perhaps the phone is the perfect place to start. If you're expecting a package, you could opt to transmit your current location, via mobile app, to the post office or courier service. Then, no matter where you go, they would be able to find you and get your package to you. This also eliminates the need for keeping postal addresses up to date with companies. When they want to send you something, it can just come straight to you, even if you move house permanently. You don't need to arrange for anyone to pick up your mail while you're on holiday, either, although getting bills at that time might ruin the relaxation.

It might be tricky and creepy in crowds, and in some places you might need them to wait outside for you - if you're at the movies, for instance, you don't need your mail carrier to buy a ticket and follow you inside.

It also raises some privacy concerns, since a system like that would (not just could, would) either be hacked or abused by post office employees. It would make the hard part of a process server's job much easier, but would probably make subpoena avoidance a simple matter of turning off your phone.

Lastly, for very bulky items, you're probably going to want them to go to your home anyway. You don't want to get something huge delivered to work and then have to carry it home on public transport, if that is your custom.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You could probably make it work as a high-end option for couriers.
PPS - As long as it's reliable.

Reading my own writing

This week I'm in Perth on business. And next week, too, which is a bit sucky. Anyway, normally I don't do this - write a straight-up journal post about what I'm doing - because that's not what this blog has become, but I think maybe there should be more of that, particularly as I try to do more fiction writing and get better at that.

What I wanted to mention right now is that on the flight from Brisbane I read over my entire backlog of little writing snippets and ideas. It took about two thirds of the flight, but it was still slightly depressing how brief it was. In my mind, it is a mountain of unfinished work, waiting for inspiration. In the file, it's a few hundred paragraphs of random inspiration written down when it struck me. I did this because I read online that this was a good practice, and re-reading all your little snippets in one hit can cause you to see and make links between them that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise. And it did, so that's good. I even found an almost fully-formed story that I had forgotten. I'll be doing it again, maybe in a couple of months, to keep it all fresh in my head. The trick will be finding a few hours to do it all together, the way it should be.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That story from the archive will probably be this week's Friday Flash Fiction.
PPS - If I can polish it up in time.

The hoon solution

Possibly one of the best things we could do to combat "hoons" on the roads is to create cars that just make it feel like you're going much, much faster than you really are. That way, you can get your 200kph speed kicks at 50kph instead.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - But then again, I gather that is kind of the opposite of the point.
PPS - In that it doesn't matter what you feel, as long as other people know you're cool, because fast cars.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Real Martin

Martin was not an upstanding member of any level of society. He drank too much, had frequent violent outbursts and smoked unusual substances like he was going for some kind of record. He had a famous musician for a father and a semi-famous mother who had very little to offer society.
In other words, Martin was perfect reality TV fodder.

The station hounded him non-stop about it, saying, among other things, that it would help get the papparazzi off his back. Never mind that the station sent most of the photographers in the first place to make their point.

When Martin finally agreed (somewhere in the middle of a drunken tirade about there being no good clubs in the city) the lawyers pushed a pen and contract into his hands and the deed was done. They set him up with jobs at big, respectable firms, and he would be fired very quickly afterwards, sometimes on the same day. He would throw reams of paper at people in the copy room, spike the water cooler with vodka, proposition the secretaries and took clients to lunch at disreputable establishments.

And the whole world loved it. It was the easiest reality show the network had ever produced - they didn't have to fake, set up or prompt anything. In that sense, Martin was the easiest reality star they had ever worked with.

If not for The Incident, life would have continued to be roses for both Martin and the network for a long time.

In the middle of season 3, Martin was working at an industrial bakery and had just been fired for getting his cigarette ash in the dough. He was sitting in the gutter outside, cig still in one hand, 9am beer in the other, when an ex-girlfriend wandered up. The crew fired up the second camera to get good footage of the inevitable fight, but they weren't prepared for what happened next.

As she recognised him, the girl sat down beside Martin and just started asking, softly, "what's wrong?" over and over until he spilled his guts.

"It's just ... I try so [bleep] hard, you know? I have a good time at work, try to make friends - I'm really trying, right? And then they fire me and it's like, what was I doing wrong? What do people want from me?"

"They want you, Martin. They want to get to know you, without the drugs and booze. You remember why we broke up?"

Martin sniffed and wiped his nose with hsi beer hand. "Love, I hardly remember your name. Oh, [bleep], I'm so sorry. Who are you?"

She smiled. "I'm Angela. I tend bar at The Twisted Weasel?" Martin nodded, eyes somewhat glazed. "It's okay. The point is, even with your fun-loving personality and your camera crew, people can't see you. I couldn't see you when we were together."

"What do you mean?"

"All I mean is that people don't need the party animal. They just need you."

Martin set his beer down and dropped his still-burning cigarette butt into it, though neither was even half finished yet. He gave Angela a hug, which was almost unheard-of for Martin, and she excused herself, wishing him well, then glaring daggers at the cameras as she left.

From then on, Martin just wasn't as much fun for the cameras. He cut way back on his drinking and smoking, and he held down jobs for weeks at a time. Despite the crew's prodding and tempting, he just wasn't interested in wild parties any more. The crew scrambled to find more interesting footage than Martin calmly making fifty copies of a report and turning them in on time. The whole show crumbled, but Martin seemed a lot better. It just turned out that happy Martin was bad TV, so the show had to be cancelled. And that, finally, was what made Martin truly happy.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is much later than I usually post for Friday, so I'm sorry.
PPS - But it is still Friday.

Custom making handbags

The first consumer items custom made by default will probably be handbags. They'd have the highest value proposition for custom manufacturing. Hair accessories would be easier, but not as worthwhile, and clothes would be very worthwhile but not as easy. But I've been dragged along handbag shopping with women, and there is always some very specific set of properties they are looking for, all individual to the woman in question. One wants a big, deep bag with a short strap and a wide opening, while another wants dozens of tiny pockets stitched together and several openings. I am certain, with a few very basic mix-and-match components, you could make handbags to order quickly and easily, though perhaps not very cheaply. But if they're made of good materials, people will pay for quality.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That's the theoretical business model, anyway.
PPS - And likely to stay theoretical.

Solving hard problems with games we already play

Someone needs to work on encoding our hard problems into games we already play. If all those hours spent playing Solitaire on Windows could actually also be used, completely invisibly, to get people to figure out how proteins fold up, that would be an amazing gain.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I have no idea how to do that, though.
PPS - Probably the game mechanics are usually too different to be twisted into solving problems.

Mobile computing offline

My big catch phrase about mobile computing is "offline anywhere". The mobile network, so far, is too slow, unreliable and limited for a lot of common tasks, so the way I want to go is to take those tasks and make them available offline, using bandwidth when they can (preferably WiFi to save on extortionist 3G data costs) but working without any network connection at all most of the time. For a lot of web services, it simply isn't necessary to have a constant network connection. An action list, for example, can live on your phone, but as long as it keeps in sync when a WiFi network is available, you don't need the website itself most of the time. Any commands you issue will simply take effect on the server's database the next time the app connects, and that's fine.

When you're dealing with a small amount of data that doesn't have to be 100% up to date right now, if you're not using a small offline database with occasional sync, you're doing it wrong.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't expect this to be the case forever. We're always building better networks.
PPS - It's just that the mobile data network has the most room to grow.

Misunderstanding computers

What is the average person's mental model of a computer? Most people don't seem to have a clear idea what a computer does and how it works. There's two kinds of space - hard drive and memory - and only one affects how fast the computer runs. This is pretty important for understanding computers, because it affects your behaviour with it. You won't run as many programs at once if you understand that running programs, not installed ones or big files, that slows down computers.

But is it worth trying to correct that perception? How much does the average person need to know about how a computer really works? It might affect how they use it and how they maintain it, but if they're replacing computers every couple of years and mostly using them for Facebook games and email, how much does it matter? People who fail to understand computers will mostly be using tablets in the near future, and tablets can hardly be misunderstood at all. The big difference that helps? You can only run one app at a time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Tablets, though, do still have a memory/hard drive difference.
PPS - That is, you can install lots of apps and not slow it down.

We need packaged services for Windows

There needs to be a concept on Windows of a fully-configured, standalone service that can be packaged up and easily distributed and installed alongside any number of other services performing similar jobs. Quite often it is necessary when developing a particular program to have certain services, such as a database and web service, in place for the build environment to work properly. Every client company will have a slightly different configuration of different services, and they do not play nicely together. Setting them up is always a pain and is always the subject of a lot of the developer documentation - how to find, install and configure the right services - and a constant source of frustration.

It would be far better if the services could simply be configured by the original developers and packaged up, then downloaded and installed painlessly. No more relying on third party projects to keep up to date, no more advising which versions to use and how to configure them for the default build, just a simple set of downloads and painless installs.

The best answer so far is to use virtual machines - entire copies of Windows that run as applications with their associated services pre-configured. The trouble for us at work is that you can't use really big virtual hard drives with virtual machines, so our huge databases don't fit there.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I think I might be thinking of something like Juju on Ubuntu.
PPS - But that's not for Windows and is geared towards cloud environments, if I understand it.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Institute

The Institute was opened on a convergence of leylines. On the site previously had lived a jail which had later been converted into an 18th century insane asylum. It wasn't a pleasant spirit on which to found a peaceful sanctuary for the magically afflicted, but it would have to do.

Director Cobb recrossed her legs under her desk, fidgeted with her pen and let her tail swish freely through the gap cut in her chair. The budget was disturbing her. Again. One of the problems with living on a mystical convergence was the insurance: it kept going up, month by month, and Cobb was never sure if their numbers would add up the same way twice. The fae mathematics behind it were beyond her, but it seemed they were beyond the abilities of the outsourced accounting firm, too.

She stood from her desk and stretched her legs, removed her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. She needed a walk to clear her head, so she strolled past the wide, apportioned rooms (furnished inside the old jail cells, but spaced with much more generosity), down the back stairs and into the garden. Officially, in their brochure for prospective tenants, it was called "The Enchanted Garden", and they'd had plans for manicured lawns and hedges, topiary, a fountain and perhaps even a waist-high hedge maze. Cobb's tail twitched in irritation as it brushed the top of the unmowed grass. The groundskeeper had been slacking again, but they couldn't fire him. He was the only one who could keep the venus fly traps from growing too large and eating residents.

Finally, Cobb came to the fountain, which was actually more of a makeshift pond. Sitting on the one stone bench they had been able to afford was Colleen, a sad case who had been cursed to think she was both a fairy and a mute. She spoke aloud, but insisted she was communicating via "mind speech".

Colleen smiled a pleasant smile and patted the bench beside her. Cobb sat down, careful not to sit on Colleen's glittering wings.

"How are you today, Colleen?"

In her sing-song voice, Colleen replied "I am quite well, Ms Cobb. How do you do?"

"Not so well, I'm afraid." Colleen nodded, and Cobb continued. "It's the finances again."

Colleen pouted. "I keep offering to take care of it. With my magic, we wouldn't need lighting, and we could grow our own food. We needn't be beholden to the county in this."

Cobb kept herself from sighing with years of practice. "Thank you, Colleen, but we couldn't impose on you to take over from our light switches. Plus, what would we do when you leave?"

Colleen nodded, accepting the assessment gravely, but added "Let me help somehow, Director. I feel like I should be contributing more."

Cobb was about to refuse, when she remembered something. "You were an accountant before you came here, weren't you?"

"I taught accounting at high school."

"Close enough. Would you like to look at our books? See if you can find us a way to save some money?"

"I would be glad to," said Colleen.

In Cobb's office, Colleen pored over the ledgers with a confused expression on her face, flicking pages back and forth, growing more agitated by the second. After half an hour, Cobb interrupted her saying "It's alright, Colleen. If it's too much, you can go back to the garden."

Colleen startled, seeming to have forgotten that she was not alone. "Oh, no, Director, I'm sorry, I got caught up. It's just that the numbers don't add up correctly."

"Yes, there's something about the fae mathematics. The rules are a bit different here."

"Oh, no," said Colleen, waving her hand, "I know all about that. But these numbers don't add up correctly by those rules either."

"What do you mean they don't add up?"

"I mean, well, look at this account here. This is the building maintenance fund, yes? Well, these additions here should have gone to the total, but even with the twisted fae maths, it's clear they didn't."

"So what's actually going on, then?" asked Cobb, already sure she knew the answer.

"Your accountants are ripping you off, and trying to lie about it using fae maths."

Cobb pursed her lips. "No time to waste, then. Can you perform a full audit, so we can fire these ... creeps, and then, if you would, we'd love to have you take over as head accountant for the Institute."

Colleen smiled. "I'd like that, Director. I'd like that a lot."

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I suppose this one owes a bit to both Sanctuary and Lost Girl.
PPS - Though they rarely deal with accounting ripoffs.

Server-side programming

People are attracted to server-side programming because it simplifies the heck out of network communication. Instead of there being a problem in a network of finding where to send some data or message, a dedicated server taking on that role makes it clear where everything should go. Unfortunately, it creates some problems, too. It is now a single point of failure, so if the server goes down, everything goes down. If the server's hard drives crash, all the data is lost. If the server can't cope with the traffic load, then nothing works. You don't really eliminate the problem so much as exchange it for other, better problems.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Personally, I've never been much of a fan.
PPS - But then, I cut my teeth on client-side software and dabbled in P2P networking back in the QBasic days, so I might be biased.

Political power

Rules for thinking about political power:

1. Power that can be abused will be abused eventually.
2. Power that can be abused in secret will be abused much more quickly and more often.
3. Once power is abused once, it will be abused again more easily.
4. The power to gain more abusable power will not end well for anyone.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I realise these rules are all about abuse of power.
PPS - Because, really, power that's not being abused is almost not worth worrying about.

Catching up with online content

I often wish it were possible, via RSS or some other online mechanism, to catch up on some content you discover online long after it starts. It's overwhelming to look at a website - a blog or a web comic - with several years of history and feeling like you'll never get to catch up. There aren't any tools for dealing with that, you know? All you can do is go to the beginning and click through each page manually, until you get to the point where you are caught up and can finally subscribe. I did that with Starslip, when I finally discovered it, and then it had stopped forever by the time I caught up.

It works well enough if it's a normal website, but if it's on Facebook, like Daniel H. Wilson's Amped prequel blog of fictional character Samantha Blex, it is much, much worse. The only thing you can do is scroll up and down the page, visually scanning to make sure you're looking at the right entry in sequence and clicking to expand each one. That's probably more a problem with Facebook's Timeline, though.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I am looking forward to reading Amped.
PPS - But that's getting further off topic.

How to get a job

Steps to getting a job:

1. Find an industry where you would be passionate about the work.
2. Figure out what skills employers are looking for.
3. Get those skills. If that means formal education, do that, but self-education is just as valid.
4. Sell yourself to employers by referencing those skills.

If you find that you can't get the necessary skills, or there are no employers and you can't go freelance, you might need to look for a different industry. This plan actually works just the same for creative industries, but the competition is higher and the entry-level pay grades suck.

The trouble with the usual approach is that it's trying to optimise the usual steps of the process:

1. Resume and cover letter.
2. Interview.
3. Job offer.

Having a clear, eye-catching resume is no help if you don't have something to put on it (ie marketable skills). Being great at interviews is no help if you don't have the right skills to sell. Negotiating a job offer just won't happen if employers don't see the right skills in you. It all comes down to step 3 up there: get yourself some marketable skills.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The only other plan I've seen work is to be born into a rich family (99th percentile) and get handed a large corporation for free.
PPS - Most people have trouble with that first bit. It's hard to arrange.

Watching movies on the train

Over the course of a week, I watched Christopher Nolan's Batman movies on the train to and from work with a small portable DVD player. The experience was not especially satisfying. The screen was small and the backlight poor, so half the time I was just imagining what was going on while I listened and watched a mostly-black screen. The very dark movies probably didn't help in this regard. The other unfortunate aspect of the screen was the resolution. The widescreen movies seemed to be squashed vertically somehow. Sound was adequate, through my headphones, and the player didn't struggle keeping the discs playing while the train jostled me around. So, on the whole, I only recommend this practice for well-lit movies that are low on action. Also, it would work better on 30-minute TV shows rather than 2-hour movies that have to be broken up into pieces.

For comparison, next I watched the Matrix trilogy on my netbook, which has a bigger, brighter, higher-resolution screen. They are similarly dark action movies, so the comparison should be valid. The results were much more satisfying, which proves that screen size and quality are a pretty important factor when watching video. But you already know that. To be completely fair, the weather during Batman Week had been very bright and sunny, while during the Matrix week it was overcast, so there wasn't as much direct sunlight to battle with the netbook screen. Sound on the Matrix movies was more of a problem, but that's a known issue with The Matrix anyway - quiet dialogue followed by loud action and music. Also, the netbook was slower to start up and shut down than the DVD player, which meant I got through slightly less of the movies on each trip.

The goal of this whole experiment was to find a good way to fit more movies into my life in the small pieces of spare time I have. I proved that I could do it on the train, if need be, but in the end, I started resenting the time it was taking away from my reading and writing. So I think, if I must, I will watch movies at lunchtime on my computer at work, instead of struggling with small screens on a loud, moving train.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If I had to do it again, I'd use the netbook.
PPS - But I don't have to.

Friday Flash Fiction - Janice and the Vampire

"Why do you wear those things?" Sean asked Janice. Janice looked down at the gloves she was absently putting on - black, fingerless, with a cross stitched on each knuckle.

"Because you never know."

Years before, Janice had been a carefree university student, attending (most of) her classes during the day, studying or partying by night at the share house near the campus. It all changed that November.

The after-exam party started off great. There were dozens of people, the music was loud, the booze was flowing freely and everyone was having a great time. Janice was swimming in the pool on her own, just a few minutes after everyone else had gotten out - there was pizza just delivered, but Janice wasn't hungry.

Floating on her back, looking up at the stars and hoping that she had passed her Psych final, she thought she heard something in the upstairs bedroom. Now, the house had a game they played. If you caught one of the others in their room with a boy, they did the dishes for a week. It had been Cathy's idea. Jan suspected it was just Cathy's excuse to barge into people's rooms whenever she felt like it, but it had saved Janice from dish washing duty more than once.

It was Cathy's room where Janice heard the noise and, watching the window, she saw someone walk past. No, not walking. Chasing.

Janice grabbed her towel and got out of the pool as quickly and quietly as she could. If she could catch Cathy in the act, it would be the first time ever. Either Cathy was very good at sneaking around, or she never brought boys home. As Janice sneaked upstairs, the music was still playing loudly, but everyone was sitting down. Janice was just glad nobody got in her way.

Creeping up the stairs, Janice eased Cathy's door open and could definitely hear sounds like an enthusiastic make-out session. She flung the door wide, flicked the light on and yelled "Gotcha!", but the sounds weren't of kissing.

There was a man in the room, he seemed to be biting Cathy, and she was lolling, eyes wide open and glassy, mouth in a weird quirk. She was dead.

The man turned towards Janice, and his mouth dripped with blood. His eyes were ... mesmerising. Janice found herself getting lost in them from across the room, until he blinked, or she did, and she had the sense to scream.

The man leapt up from the bed and chased Janice out the door. Her still-wet feet slipped on the wooden floor as she made for the stairs, but the vampire - even in her panic, Janice's subconscious offered up the only word that fit - got a handful of her wet hair and dragged her back. He pinned her to the floor and stared into her eyes again, then that same feeling of calm and peace came over Janice. He was just going to bite her. It was okay.

Then Janice snapped out of it again, and remembered the cross around her neck. She held the thing up like a ward and, despite what decades of vampire movies had been saying, it worked. The vampire hissed - actually hissed! - and drew back from the silver crucifix, and even seemed to wither in its presence. He hunched down in a corner, shielding his eyes, but kept peeking back, looking like he hoped Janice would give up and go away.

Janice got close enough this time to press the cross into his forehead, where it left a red welt. With a scream, the vampire turned to dust and crumbled before her eyes.

Everyone else was already dead, but Janice had survived.

"And that's why I wear the gloves," she said. "It's why I joined the police force, too. To hunt them and protect people from them."

Sean just stared at his partner with wide eyes. "Wow. Janice, I had no idea. I just ... I'm going to wait in the car. Come along when you're ready." He left, and Anne, another officer, walked over with a sly grin.

"None of that's true, is it?"

"Well, I did room with a Cathy at uni."

They both laughed.

"So why tell him all that?" asked Anne.

"You know how superstitious Sean is. Bet you twenty bucks he wears a cross for at least a week."

"How about you bet he wears it for two weeks, I bet he takes it off after one."

"Deal."

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I felt much better about this one when I figured out how it should end.
PPS - And that was when I was halfway through writing it.

Hard data and self improvement

Data collection and analysis is the key to self-awareness, and self-awareness is the key to self-improvement. If you want to improve yourself, you need hard data on where you are and what is keeping you there. If you want to make better spending habits, you need to track every cent you spend so that it stares you right in the face. If you want to make better eating habits, you need a solid record of everything that goes into your mouth. The best tools to do this will vary from person to person, but for eating, I suggest the following: take a picture of everything you eat. Collect them by date and keep them somewhere that's always in front of you. You might be surprised how many biscuits, chocolates, coffees, snacks and fast food meals show up in what you think of as a healthy diet. Your mind is bad at seeing that pattern until it is forced on you. That's the point. Actual data is much more convincing than "I think I eat pretty healthy" or "I don't spend that much".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Every fad diet works for someone, because they all start with "write down everything you eat".
PPS - Just like every weird budget technique works on some level by tracking what you spend.

Born last century

By 2030, we'll probably see a fair bit of discrimination against people who were born last century. That's when the first babies of the 21st century will start hitting their 30s and taking up management positions in our corporations. Also, since they're all grown up and the teenagers of the day will be born in that century too, any birth year starting with "19" will start looking really old, even if it's "1999". My "1979" will look like "stone age" to the neon-bright software geeks of the day.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not looking forward to that.
PPS - But then, who does look forward to feeling old?

Microsoft's identity

Who is Microsoft? Do they have a sense of identity that clearly communicates who they are and what they want? They are a server OS company, they are a productivity software company, a development tools company, a game console company and now a consumer hardware company. What if they were aiming to be seen as the mid-range option, producing cheap software and hardware of quality good enough for most people? If the quality is high enough and the price is low enough, that will sell.

Apple aims for gleaming sculptures of consumer electronics, polished within an inch of their lives, and priced as if they don't expect you to replace it in 12 months. Microsoft should produce solid quality at reasonable prices. Not the no-fuss, no-frills, bargain basement stuff, just good hardware and software that people can afford. Differentiate from Apple by going for sensibility, not being just as shiny.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The problem, of course, is that shiny also sells.
PPS - And sells very well.

Email rewards links and phishing

The practice of sending emails with rewards program offers waiting to be "activated" by clicking a link in email is setting a bad precedent. If we are expecting lots of these things (I typically receive three or four per week from Woolworths) then people will get into the habit of blindly scrolling down and clicking the link, because it's the fastest, easiest, least-intrusive way of getting all you can from a rewards program. Why would you *not* activate an offer like that? Even if you think you won't use it, since it costs nothing but offers something in return, it's infinite value for money. You might as well just click them all automatically.

That's where phishing can start. A scammer constructs an email exactly like the rewards ones, but directs the link to a malware site that does a drive-by download of whatever they like. Woolworths is making that easier, and I think that's a bad idea.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Most security checklists start at number 1 with "Never click a link in email. Ever."
PPS - And number 2 is "No, seriously. Never."

Good ideas and good actions

It's not enough to have good ideas. You have to be able to act on them. You can't make money directly from the idea of a gadget. You can't be a conceptual house painter. There are no theoretical gardeners. You make actual things of value, or you do not. I am personally too often on the theory side of that theory vs practice fence.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's a matter of priorities, and sometimes skills.
PPS - I prioritise my writing above all my other creative pursuits.

Friday Flash Fiction - Sister Margaret

A nun walks into a bar with a crow on her shoulder. I know how that sounds, but stick with me. Sister Margaret is not an ordinary nun, nor is the crow an ordinary crow. Oh, she wears the habit and carries a rosary, sure, and as far as anyone else can tell, the crow only says "caw", but they are far from ordinary.

They hunt monsters.

The bar patrons lower their voices on instinct. Many try to hide their drinks behind their hands, childhood shame taking over, but Sister Margaret is not here for them. A nervous man sits at the back of the bar at a table by himself, nursing a small glass of something clear. Sister Margaret takes a seat and the crow hops off her shoulder to sit on the table and peck at a bowl of nuts.

Despite the quiet, nobody can hear their conversation. If they could, they'd wish they hadn't. The man speaks and Sister Margaret nods, absently clicking the beads of her rosary. Her expression of grim concentration never wavers, but the muscles twitch beneath the scar on her cheek. When she nods, the man pushes a bulging envelope towards Margaret with pleading in his eyes. She opens it, removes two green notes and pushes the rest back. A vow is a vow. She takes what she needs to survive, having long abandoned the convent.

Later, in a dark alley near the man's home, Margaret crouches in the shadows, her face covered by a veil. The crow perches on a nearby fire escape. They wait a long time, until a movement alerts the crow who caws his warning. From the sewer grate crawls a shape with bulbous forearms barely a metre tall. As it passes a beam of light, Sister Margaret gets a view of the creature, and a look of hesitation crosses her features for just a second.

The creature is a child. Or, rather, it used to be a child. Now it is a hive, flesh pocked with hundreds of honeycomb cells and leaking vital fluids in its shuffling gait, mouth frozen in a silent scream. Margaret almost pitied it, until a stray cat dashed in front of it. With hands that moved too quickly to see, the monster snatched the cat and broke its neck, then bit a huge chunk out of the flesh, fur and all. The creature's distended belly squirmed with some internal activity Sister Margaret did not wish to contemplate.

Through the wet sounds of bloody mastication and the buzzing demonic insects, the crow cawed again and the thing turned its head, dead white eyes staring. Margaret wasted no time. She covered the distance in a few long steps and swung her sharp blade, beheading the creature with one swipe. The swarm buzzed about her in anger, but her veil and gloves kept her from becoming their next monstrous hive. She fogged the local area with a special blessed pesticide, and the bugs began to pop in white flashes of holy light.

When the dust had settled, Sister Margaret knelt and administered the last rites for the child, closing his eyes, covering his unrecognisable face with her handkerchief, but then pushed the body back into the sewer grate it had crawled from. The soul should have rest, but the body needed to be hidden. Her crow pecked out the eyes of the cat, and Margaret supposed that was as good as the cat was going to get from either of them.

She cleaned her blade and sheathed it somewhere beneath her habit, then she and her crow strode off to find some humble lodgings for the night.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I really like this one.
PPS - It was going to be a contest entry at Pseudopod, but now it's over the word limit.

Internet access is important for work

To most IT departments, the internet is like a big, messy, dirty, dangerous playground to which they hold the keys. It's not necessary for anyone to go there, ever, and if the gate is blocked (or broken or on fire), there's no hurry to fix it. It's just an unnecessary playground, after all.

To a programmer, the internet is the library where we keep all of our reference materials, and the IT department is the unnecessary bouncer at the library door, sometimes preventing us from getting in, and sometimes refusing to clear the door when it's blocked. Also, quite often, the internet is how we contact and maintain the services for which we are responsible. If we can't get in there, we literally cannot do our jobs, either partly or completely. So when the IT department treats internet access as an optional extra to the office and a low priority to fix, we can get a bit upset, but to them it probably sounds like we're crying because we can't get to Facebook.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Thankfully, this doesn't happen too often to us.
PPS - But it still does happen.

Better spies than James Bond

To me, James Bond has never seemed very interesting as a character. What's interesting about Bond seems to be what happens around him. He's got a bunch of gadgets that come in handy at just the right moment, cool cars and fast women. The man himself doesn't even seem to matter very much to the story, except that he's there to set off his gadgets at the right time.

To me, a spy is most interesting when you take away all the gadgets, the resources and the backing of a government agency. The interesting part is their training that allows them to survive on their own, despite the odds. It's why Jason Bourne and Michael Westen appeal to me a lot more than James Bond. Before the reboot with Daniel Craig, Bond was all about gadgets, cars and women, over-the-top villains and ridiculous plots. What I liked about Casino Royale was that they took all of that stuff away from Bond - to such an extent that there wasn't even a Q in it - and made Bond work with much less. That, plus the opening parkour scene, made it the first memorable Bond movie I had ever seen.

Then, of course, they started bringing it all back and I lost interest again. And that's okay, as long as someone else keeps making spy movies that are about spies, not toys.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - From now on, I will refer to James Bond movies as "toy movies" instead of "spy movies".
PPS - It really sounds different like that.

Disposable bandwidth

They say it's when a resource becomes so cheap that we can consider it disposable that situations really change for it. When paper was precious, only the most important things got written down, and only the richest or most important people could read or write. When paper got cheaper, we started having a publishing industry. Now, paper is practically free, almost everyone can read and write and we can afford to tear up paper to wrap up gum to throw away.

Internet bandwidth is still in that middle stage. It's common, so we've been building an industry around it, but it's not so cheap or reliable that we can consider wasting it, especially on mobile devices. It's everywhere, but it's still precious. Only important tasks get to use it. It's becoming a reflex, for sure, and we don't think of it consciously, but it hasn't really earned that, in my estimation.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If bandwidth were practically free, we could keep all our media in the cloud without thinking about it.
PPS - For example.

Where were you when you heard about Google?

It seems to be common among geeks to remember where you were when you first heard about this amazing new search engine called Google. How did such an event come to stick in our minds as much as events of great tragedy? For me, I didn't even get to see the website for several hours, so it wasn't a reaction to seeing it in action. What I remember is being at a party and a friend telling me that Google worked more intuitively than AltaVista. I filed away that info and checked it out later when I got home, I assume. So why did that conversation, rather than actually seeing Google in action, stick in my mind?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've checked this with my workmates.
PPS - All of them have a similar story.

Anonymity play

I was at university when my friends and I got email for the first time. One game we played was to change our names on email or chat, to keep our friends guessing who was really on the other end. Why did we do this? Were we playing with identity, trying out different personae to see what fit? Maybe. From what I remember, though, most of the game was just to see if you could keep a friend from recognising you, which doesn't make much sense if you're trying to sort out the essentials of your identity. After all, that's much more easily done with strangers who don't know you at all, and there are (or were) plenty of strangers to chat to.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Maybe we were just playing with anonymity because it was our new toy.
PPS - That's the best explanation I have.

Friday Flash Fiction - Traveller

This will be the most difficult Travel I have made so far.

A few weeks ago, a kind of blimp floated into the sky above my home town. It's fairly unremarkable, except that it's relatively small, it doesn't seem to have a pilot and it's got a platform attached to the side with a door that leads into the body. I've seen this much through my telescope. It seems obvious to me that it's meant for Travellers like myself - people who can teleport at will - because there would be no other way up there.

Well, maybe you could shoot it down, or a particularly skilled helicopter pilot on a very calm day could lower someone on a rope, but nobody has been trying that, as far as I can tell. It's meant to find me, and others like me.

I dress warm, about three layers should do it, and pack a little food and some tools in case I have to force my way inside. I take some last-minute measurements with my telescope, estimating speed and distance as best I can, then I take a deep breath and Travel.

The world twists beneath my feet, like I'm spinning on an axis that doesn't fit in the world. There's a sound of rushing wind and the shapes don't make sense to my eyes. I have to concentrate to make sure I go to the right place. Keeping the blimp fixed in my mind, I feel for the platform in this swirling space and suddenly I find it, tumbling out and rolling towards its edge. I put out my hands to brace myself and my left goes off the edge, overbalancing me. My foot slips and I am dangling for a second, several kilometres up. The sharp metal cuts my fingers as I strain back up and pull myself onto my back, and I rest. The platform sways in the wind and I hold on until I catch my breath.

A little closer to the door, the platform has a handrail, but I decide not to trust it with my weight. The whole platform is a bit rusty and creaks as I crawl forwards. I can push the door in a few centimetres before it stops on the rusted hinges. Lying on my back, I kick at it until my feet hurt, and it opens just far enough for me to squeeze inside.

The room is even smaller than I thought it would be. There's a bit of broken glass on the floor, probably from a porthole on the wall. A gas lamp hangs on a chain from the ceiling, but I don't need it, and couldn't light it anyway. The walls are covered in photos and note paper in several different styles of handwriting. I see one section written in German, too. There are dozens of different faces, and the notes don't seem to follow any kind of pattern. At a guess, I'd say this place has been used by dozens of different people over a long period of time. As I take out my camera to start snapping pictures, the floor lets out a long, creaking groan, then breaks open under me and I'm falling.

Before I build up too much speed, I Travel to the local pool and startle some kids as I splash down. My camera's going to be ruined, and I don't know if I can - or should - go back to the blimp. Whoever made it is long gone, obviously, but the others who used it might still be around. Maybe I can find them, if I can figure out where to look.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm late with this because I was a bit busy today.
PPS - And now I'm going to bed. Goodnight!

Bank website design

I don't like that transferring money online through Suncorp is broken into three different types: transfer between my accounts, transfer to another Suncorp account or transfer to an external account. Internally, to the bank, I am sure these are very different operations, involving quite distinct methods of funds transfer, but to me, the customer, they are all basically the same, and that's what matters to me. The main problem is that it divides my bank account "address book" into two distinct lists: Suncorp Customers and Others, and I have to remember which group someone is in before I can transfer any money. It doesn't matter to me whether they are Suncorp customers or not. That only matters to Suncorp, but they are foisting that internal distinction onto me, presumably to make life easier on their programmers.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Other banks do things like this, too.
PPS - I only know this one because I'm with Suncorp.

Buildings and wireless technology

We should be making houses and other buildings that don't interfere with wireless signals. Whether that means making them radio invisible or making the whole house into an antenna, I don't know. The point is that all kinds of wireless signals - TV, radio, WiFi, 3G etc - are a huge part of our lives and economy these days. The fact that they get blocked by our ordinary buildings means we have problems everywhere.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is probably the civilian application of stealth technology.
PPS - Or those "invisibility cloak" experiments I keep hearing about. Same principle.

Creators and critics

I've seen the beginnings of a kind of creative movement online, or just a creative attitude. I'm sure it's older than what I've seen, but the basis is this: your right to criticise or comment on anything is proportional to the amount you create yourself. This means that practically every YouTube comment is rendered invalid, because the commenter is (usually) not a creator. It also matters how high is the quality of what you create and how many people like it. But in essence, unless you make things, you don't get to criticise the things other people make. And, conversely, I don't have to listen to your criticism unless you make things too. Your value as a critic is directly related to your value as a creator.

Now, you will know whether you like something, and you will probably tell other people what you like and don't like. That's fine, as long as there's more in the positive column than the negative one. But one thing you can't do with your negative opinion is take it to the creator and demand they stop making things. The New Makers Reputation Economy (TM) is built on people continuing to make things. If you ever advocate that it stops, you won't be heard.

So, two take-home points. Number one: go out there and make things. Don't just sit and think about making them, go and actually do it. Even though the first things you make are going to suck, make them anyway. Number two: once you've started making things, then you can start commenting on the things other people have made.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I need to learn some more skills to make physical things.
PPS - And not because I want to criticise anyone.

Non-urgent communication

Texting has reached the point where we expect people to see and respond to their messages immediately. Email, too, at least during business hours. The only "non-urgent" form of electronic communication I can think of now is Facebook messages. We don't expect people to be on Facebook constantly, so any messages we send there can be ignored for a while, but that means sending all of our non-urgent personal communications through Mark Zuckerberg. I don't like that idea.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And when you think of it, we probably shouldn't send anything that way.
PPS - But who's going to do stop?

Laptops suck

People have been buying laptops much more than desktop computers, for home use, because they're easier to set up, they have only one external cable (for power), and you can move them easily. They really do have a lot of advantages that way, but there are some down sides that people don't often account for.

They cost more. That's the first red flag that should get raised when you're thinking of buying a laptop. You will be paying several hundred dollars extra for the convenience.

They are less powerful. In almost everything that goes into a computer, they suck more than a desktop. Slower processors, less disk space, less RAM, more heat, smaller screen, fewer USB ports. That's just what you get on every model. And remember, you're paying extra for this.

They are much less ergonomic. The screen and keyboard positions cannot and will not ever meet proper ergonomic guidelines if the screen is attached directly above the keyboard. Long-term, you may injure yourself.

They have all-in-one failure modes. If the keyboard stops working or the screen goes dead, your options for replacements and repairs are more limited and expensive.

Lastly, the battery will wear out, but by then you will probably not be able to replace just that part, because next year's model will use a slightly different battery and nobody will be selling the old model any more. From then on, your portable machine becomes a low-powered, cramped, uncomfortable, unstable, expensive, stationary computer.

My only conclusion is that people in general must be resolved to spending $1500 every two years on a new laptop, because "that's just what you do". I spent $1200 on a desktop about four years ago and it's still going strong. I expect it to last at least another two years.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If you "need" your computer to be mobile, buy a tablet for $250.
PPS - If that actually doesn't do everything mobile that you need, then you might need a laptop.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Inner Circle

I had finally worked my way into the inner circle. The Illuminati, the most secret of secret societies, those who run the world. I was sitting at a table with the puppet-masters themselves. They all wore masks, but mine had cameras at every angle the tech boys could figure out how to jam them in. Maybe we wouldn't get their bare faces, but we'd get their voices at least.

I had worked my way quickly up through the ranks of the Sydney criminal organisations, found their contacts in local politics and followed the unofficial chain of command up from there. It took years to get in contact with the upper-echelon bankers online and get them to agree to this meeting. I could bring them all down at once. It would make my career, if anyone could ever hear about it.

Everyone at the table seemed to be waiting for someone else to take control of the meeting, so I figured I should probably let them know I had called it and why. It seemed unlikely they would be happy about it.

Just as I was going to open my mouth, however, a woman at the other end of the table, wearing a mask made of crow feathers, spoke up.

"You've been called here to attend an important meeting. You have no idea just how important it is." She took off her mask with a flourish, and it was a second before I realised that there were no gasps of surprise from the other members. "My name is Special Agent Regina Flores, FBI, and all of you are under arrest for several varieties of conspiracy that I'll be happy to go over with you later."

I was about to pull off my own mask when two men sitting beside Agent Flores stood up and introduced themselves as CIA agents. "We'll take over from here," they said, without any humour or recognition of any growing absurdity.

Then someone else stood up - MI5, apparently - and FSB and several other national intelligence agencies announced themselves. In the midst of the shouting, I tried to bring out my badge and tell people I was with ASIO, but the arguments about jurisdiction and rage about blowing years of cover work had started, as would be expected. There were lots of fists pounding on the table and someone started shoving. It looked like nobody was actually with the Illuminati at all, and I made a quick exit before the full-on brawl began. As I slunk quietly out of the building, I started mentally composing a report on the matter, preparing to close it off, then I thought, wait a minute, someone did send us here. This intelligence community nightmare might have been exactly what they wanted. Expose all the rats at once and go on with their business. Perhaps I still had work to do.

That's the thing about secret societies, though. You never quite know when you're done with them, or, really, if you've even started.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This one just seemed like fun to me.
PPS - It was one of those random thoughts that occur to me sometimes.

Accessing Exchange from my Android phone is a bad idea

Google is retiring Google Calendar Sync, claiming that it is no longer needed, because it is possible to access Microsoft Exchange calendars from an Android device directly. I decided to give this a go.

After a short period of searching online for some settings advice, I got my company Exchange account added on my Android phone. It gave me a warning that the account administrator required some additional privileges on my phone in order to activate this account. Though I was somewhat wary, I clicked the "Okay" button and finished setting it up.

As soon as the phone tried to access Exchange, a message popped up to tell me exactly what permissions the Exchange server required on my phone to allow me to access my email and calendar. The first item? Erase all data, performing a full factory reset remotely, at any time, without warning or approval from me, the owner of the phone.

No. Absolutely not. I am not handing over that permission to my company admins, for two reasons. Number one, they will activate it, destroying my personal data along with my company contacts, email and calendar, if I ever choose to leave the company. That's what it's for. There's no arguing here that they won't actually do so, that the permission is just a precaution. They didn't have to request that scary permission, and they wouldn't unless they intended to use it. Number two, I don't trust that they won't accidentally activate it, say, when they're trying to nuke someone else's phone. Worse, there is apparently a bug in Exchange that can cause that feature to activate if you make ONE incorrect login attempt. Our passwords expire monthly. If I forget to change it on my phone when it expires, KABOOM. Factory-reset phone.

This leaves me with a problem: Google Calendar Sync was the only way I could legitimately access my work calendar on my phone, and it is no longer supported. I will not hand over the "Nuke My Phone" button to the company IT department. I am, therefore, out of options.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or, actually, out of Google-supported options.
PPS - I'm sure I could work something else out on my own.

Apps for staying in contact are too visible

There's a problem with synchronous internet communications, like IM and VoIP. The problem is that I am not always in one place, looking at one screen, on one network and connected to one profile. My PC at work stays switched on and connected to the internet all week, but I'm not sitting there all week. I go home at night, or I go out at lunchtime. During those times, my home computer or my phone might be a better way to reach me. Plus, I am listed on four (!) individual accounts: Facebook, MSN, Google Talk and Skype. The best I can do is use Pidgin for three of them, but Skype requires its own client. All of those profiles need to follow me if I step away from the computer. Lastly, I have some contacts that are on multiple profiles, but it's tricky to group them together into one record (impossible unless I use a cross-protocol client like Pidgin). If I want to contact someone, which program do I turn to, on which machine? It's all separated a bit too far from "me in contact with my friends, family and co-workers".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Apps and operating systems need to be invisible.
PPS - I often feel like this topic needs its own label on this blog.

Technology and goals

For a while, I went around asking people "what do you wish your computer could do for you?" Now I think that's the wrong question. The trouble is that it's too narrow, and people lack imagination with computers. You ask what they wish their computers could do, and you get something like "single-spaced documents by default in Word", giving you the impression that their computers are almost perfect, except for that one tiny thing. Someone else has to do the imagining for them, after observing what their problems are. What I should be asking is "what do you wish you could do more easily?" From there, I can try and figure out what computers and technology can do to help, if anything.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Technology is just a set of tools, after all.
PPS - The goals always differ.

How I Misuse Google Calendar Sync

Recently, I realised something about the way I've been using my calendar software and, specifically, the way I've kept using Google Calendar Sync (GCS) since a long time ago. When I had a standard Nokia mobile phone, I had to use something called Nokia PC Suite to manage it when I connected it to my computer. It allowed me to synchronise my calendar with Outlook, and I also used GCS to keep Outlook and Google Calendar in line with each other. Basically, I used Outlook as a halfway house to sync my phone to Google. It was a little ugly, but it worked pretty well. Because new events could come from anywhere, all sync actions were two-way.

When I updated to a Samsung smartphone, running Android, it started synchronising with Google Calendar directly over the air, but I still used GCS to get my work calendar on my phone. Because it's what I've always done, I set it to two-way sync.

But then I got to thinking: why should my personal calendar be synchronised to the office Outlook system? I don't need it there, and I don't need them to know any of that. Plus, with it there, if I have a personal appointment, there's not much I can do to hide it from colleagues who have calendar sharing set up. So I tried an experiment: I set the sync to just go one-way from Outlook to Google. I figured that eventually my personal events would drop off the radar and I'd get just my work events in Outlook and everything in Google. Unfortunately, that transition period is a bit more of a problem than it seems. If I edit an event on my phone, for instance, and it is in the Outlook calendar, too, then GCS will overwrite my changes with the original details. I can't change anything that appears on my Outlook calendar unless I do it there first.

So it seems like more trouble than it's worth. My options are either to delete all my personal events from Outlook and recreate them on Google, or turn two-way sync back on. For now, I'm taking the easy way out and using two-way sync. Maybe, when I move jobs, I can start on the right foot by using only one-way sync against their Outlook system.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Apparently GCS is being discontinued anyway.
PPS - That's another story.

The Mostly International System of Units

Every now and then I get tired of talking in feet and inches for everyday things. We are an SI country here in Australia. We measure everything in (centi)metres and kilograms ... except for TVs and computer monitors, people's heights and newborn baby weights. Oh, and Subway sandwiches, too. Try telling people you saw a 180cm man go to Subway with his 3kg newborn, order a 30cm sub and sit down with his 25cm tablet computer. Everything about that sounds strange to me, and I was raised Metric Orthodox. I only give my height in centimetres, that's the easiest one of the lot, and I still get strange looks as people convert it back to the Middle Ages reference scheme they keep in their heads. I had to make a special effort to learn how big a "normal" newborn is in kg, because everyone always talks in pounds for that (it's about 3kg, for interest's sake). I want to measure my computer monitors and TVs in centimetres, too. It even sounds bigger that way, so I'm surprised nobody does so. I have not yet tried ordering in centimetres at Subway, though. Maybe someday.

My point is that these ancient, obtuse measurement scales have a lot of momentum, and it's going to be a long time before they are properly and rightfully put to rest, even in countries where they aren't the default. Thankfully, we're all okay with kilometres for long distance, Celsius for temperature and metric measurements for volumes and masses in the kitchen.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It would just be easier if we all used the same, standard measurements.
PPS - Of course, that's the point behind the SI standard in the first place.

Friday Flash Fiction - Banana Republic

I watched the parade coming down the beach, seeing flags waving, hearing the whistles and cheers, and beamed with pride. They carried Kapi, the first elected government representative from the lowest social caste, on a sedan chair made of bamboo and decorated with feathers and bright flowers. I had finally done it. Kapi was smiling almost as much as me when they turned inland to carry him to the government building.

Two years ago, I inherited a banana republic from a great aunt. Not a banana plantation, a whole country. A tiny island called Nollberg that had seceded from a larger nation that had seceded from an even larger one. When I first came here two years ago, only two of the three social castes were represented on the government council. Those two representatives didn't see the need for the lowest social caste to be represented at all. Pogo, the upper caste member, had particularly objected, even though the low caste made up about two thirds of the tiny island's population.

The debates were long and heated. I had to look up obscure points of law late into the night and fight to overturn some of them. Even though there were only three of us, it took a long time. We still had to govern, after all.

It came down to taxes. The poor paid no income tax and had very few possessions. But they reasoned in a circle. The poor pay no taxes, so they don't have a representative, and they have no representative because they pay no taxes. Nobody saw any reason for the low caste to have a member on the council except me.

But now I had done it. Full representation in just less than two years. I watched as Kapi's chair was lowered to the ground and he stood to wave at the people.

That's when the shot rang out. At first I didn't know what had happened. Kapi stood there for a second, looking confused, and then the blood started to soak his shirt, and he fell. The rest of the people scattered in a hurry, screams and shouts filling the air. Someone shuffled me inside, and I found myself at the council table. Pogo was the only other one there, and it took me a second to realise that he didn't look shocked at all. He looked pleased.

"Pogo? What just happened?"

"Someone shot Kapi," he replied in a plain tone, as if remarking on the weather.

"Why? Who even has guns here..." I trailed off, remembering who I was talking to. Pogo's caste was rich, by island standards. They could have got a gun here easily. It was stupid to assume that was difficult.

Pogo gave a condescending smile. "Some people do not want the poor on the council, I suppose. It's for the best. Taxes buy rights, and the poor pay none."

Nobody from the low caste would want to be elected to the council now, even if they had the right. I had changed the political landscape of Nollberg with two years of debates and legal changes. Pogo changed it back with one bullet. I just hoped it wasn't the end.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I was lucky to be inspired by a dream this week.
PPS - Hopefully next week will bring something else inspiring.

People run the world

The world runs on people. As much as you might want to think it runs on corporations or money or governments, all of those things depend on people, and many corporations don't survive without their founders. So it's clear that people run the world. And people in charge are, at their core, just like you and me. They have hopes and dreams, fears and wishes, vulnerabilities and strengths. If you approach the world as if it is run by money or corporations or governments or computers, you'll make some severe miscalculations.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Especially if you are a corporation or government.
PPS - Or a computer, I guess?

Windows on the web

Eventually, HTML will grow into a proper windowing framework like a desktop operating system, or something else will come along to do that job. At that point, it will finally be as functional as desktops of the early 90s. On one hand, that's an exciting time to look forward to. On the other hand, that level of stagnation and limitation is incredibly depressing. Websites will always look older and work slower than a local application.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - They'll never go away, of course.
PPS - They just offer too many advantages of centralisation for that.

Phone plans vs prepaid

I use my phone very little for phone calls. Mostly it's my pocket notebook, navigator and my window to the web. It's the computer I can have with me everywhere. Because I use it so little for phone calls, I wonder if I would be better off with a pre-paid phone plan. Let's see.

I'm currently on a $29 plan with 3, who were purchased by Vodafone in the middle of my contract. Over the 24 months of that plan, my total cost is about $696. My included call credit ($180/month) easily covers my calls and texts. Every two years, I sign up for a new plan mostly to get a new handset for free, so that would have to be part of a pre-paid budget too.

Now how would a prepaid plan with a BYO handset work? The new handset I currently want is the Nexus 4, for $400. If I had to buy one every 24 months, that leaves just $296 for calls and data over the two years, or just more than $12 per month. I'd have to survive on a $30 top-up only four times per year to make a pre-paid phone more cost-effective than a 24-month plan. I use more than that, though I do use fairly little.

So what about if I were to sell my old phone after 6 months and buy a new one? Well, that's much worse. Even if I were able to reclaim 75% of the original price and the prices of new phones didn't go up, I'd still be spending an extra $100 every 6 months, which is a bad deal, price-wise. It's the same cost as replacing the $400 phone every two years. The only difference is that the average age of my phone would go down, and that doesn't matter very much to me.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've never had a prepaid phone, so I might be missing some important factor.
PPS - If not, then they're terrible value for me.

Websites vs data

Websites don't matter. Valuable data is what matters. The problem is that data is most valuable to a website when it is locked up and meted out in miserly portions, but its value to customers and users increases when it is open and available to use and mix with other sources. There's a tension. The database owners need to appear to be open and generous with their data, to attract users, but need to hold it back just enough so that it retains its value to them. In other words, data only matters to website owners to the extent that it draws you to their website as a user to generate revenue, but websites only matter to you as a user to the extent that they give you access to the data you want. We don't care where data came from as long as it is easy to use and valuable to us. Website owners don't care what data we are using as long as we come to them to get it. As long as that fundamental tension exists, the internet will always be a disjointed library of isolated websites, and we will be forced to use it in awkward, difficult ways.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The tension is eased if one company controls all the data.
PPS - But that makes them a monopoly, which is bad in another way.

Modern medicine and ageing

How many generations have grown up believing that modern medicine would save them from ageing? They've all been wrong so far, to some extent. There will probably never be a "eureka" moment where lifespans multiply tenfold and the effects of old age never kick in. All of us will have to deal with either getting old or dying young.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Though, actually, nobody has to deal with dying young themselves.
PPS - As long as it's sudden.

Friday Flash Fiction - Rebuilt

The concrete trucks arrived within days of the earthquake. The city was eager to rebuild, and with a population like ours, there was no time to be sentimental about it. Too many people were out on the streets as it was - there was only so much emergency shelter to go around.

My own home was destroyed completely. I got out, along with my phone and the toaster. I was in a panic. I just grabbed the first thing I saw. I lost my computer and the backup drive that sat right beside it, so all my old family photos and videos were gone. My filing cabinet, too, with my birth certificate and passport. I kept meaning to buy a fire safe. I don't know if they help against earthquakes.

They allowed me a day of scrounging through my rubble before the bulldozers came in and levelled the place, then came the printers. They looked like big, hollow scaffolding on wheels, with hoses to pump concrete and a lot of motors on top to move the print head around. They were going to rebuild everything in basic concrete, they said. It was faster and cheaper that way. We'd all be living in identical grey boxes, the most depressing suburb you'd ever see.

I waited in line at the shelter, my box of worldly possessions at my feet, shuffling slowly towards the door, hoping that tonight I might get a bed. I don't think I can take another night in the line. My skin is clammy and my muscles numb from lack of sleep. I know I'm basically running on adrenaline alone, and I feel like I haven't showered in days.

I get a bunk in a room that used to house 2 people, but is now squeezing in five. At least there are blankets. I sleep curled up with my box at my feet, a little uneasy, but grateful for the small comforts.

In the morning, I check out the window as I brush my teeth with a shelter-provided toothbrush, and notice something odd. Over where my house used to be, there's a tall concrete tower. Lots of them, actually. I spit the toothpaste into the sink, grab my box and run as fast as I can to find out what they've done to my land.

The construction foreman won't let me past the fences to see, of course, and he's got hundreds of other people to deal with. There are cops in riot gear guarding the reconstruction area. The foreman stands up on a box to tell us all that everything is explained on the signs and pamphlets hanging beside the gate, then he ducks back inside and locks himself in. The concrete printers still climb higher, laying down rebar and concrete to grow the structures into the sky.

People push forwards, all elbows and shouting, either trying to get to the gate or to see the signs. I can only make out a few words: "compulsory sale", "high-density housing", "new era of shared living space". It doesn't sound good. On a hunch, I check my bank balance on my phone, and there's a large deposit named "compulsory sale", just like on the sign. It's not as large as it should be. I've sold my land against my will and now, I assume, I'll be allowed to buy back into this concrete jungle.

Sure enough, I had email, too. "Exciting opportunity", "bargain", and, much further down, words like "shared facilities" that, despite the positive-spin adjectives nearby, made it clear that my bathroom, shower and toilet wouldn't be mine alone. I'd get out of the emergency shelter and go straight into my own, just like it. It wasn't appealing, but at that point, I didn't have a lot of choice. I headed out to work. At least if I was going to be forced to live in a concrete box, I'd make sure I could afford a good one.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is much later than I would normally like to post a story on Friday.
PPS - And still less time than I would have liked to work on it.

Eating addiction is hard to deal with

Combating an eating addiction would be really hard for two reasons. First and foremost, you are addicted to an act that you require to stay alive. You're going to have to keep doing it, which means it's never going to be gone from your life, and you're going to have to face it every day. There's no analogy to explain that. No other addiction has that problem.

The second reason that makes it hard is that the desire for the endorphin rush you get from eating too much yummy food feels exactly like hunger to you. You can't tell that you're not really hungry, just itching for a fix. To start with, you just need to eat a very specific, portion-controlled diet and scream through the withdrawals where your body is telling you that you're still hungry - starving, even - and you'd better get more food before it gets deadly. That would be the hardest part of all.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm fairly sure I've never been addicted to eating.
PPS - Unless I still am, and don't realise it.

Saving online games from shutdown

An online game can only be saved from cancellation and abandonment if it is peer to peer or runs on an open server architecture. Otherwise, the power to turn it off resides in the hands of one company, and they can do what they want with it. And if it is already running on an open architecture or community-controlled servers, then nobody can even threaten to shut it down in the first place, so it never needs to be saved in this sense at all.

As time goes on, however, such a project still runs the risk of being outpaced by updated hardware. What used to run on Windows 95 and Pentium chips now has to deal with Windows 8 and ARM chips. Interfaces that were designed for hardware keyboards and mice don't work so well with touch screens. The software may live on, and the core concept may never die, but unless it is maintained and updated, it won't continue to be usable. Keeping software alive and functional requires constant effort, and that effort might not be best spent on maintaining old versions instead of writing new software to do the same job, or writing something else entirely.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This has been on my mind since City of Heroes shut down.
PPS - All the community effort to save it was in vain if the company wanted it gone.

Cloud desktops for phones and tablets

Cloud desktops might first be realised on phones and tablets, where we have already handed over complete control of the platform. At that point, and with people running multiple devices and migrating hardware in some cases every six months, why not attach everything to a cloud account to keep it available more easily? Indeed, we are already pushing (or being pushed) in that direction.

When all your files are in the cloud, all your apps are web services and your phone or tablet becomes a mere thin window onto the internet with no real capabilities of its own, you've already got a cloud desktop of sorts. If you can lose your device and replace it without losing anything and without having to run any backup or restore operation, you are definitely dealing with a cloud desktop.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My Android phone is not running a cloud operating system in this sense.
PPS - A lot of the apps, however, are basically websites.

3D paper printing

Perhaps affordable home 3D printing will come from paper pulp. Feed your 3D printer from your paper shredder with a little glue and some inkjet colour cartridges and you might be able to build a really cheap-to-run 3D colour printer. It would be like automated paper mache, so not actually strong or detailed, but good enough for simple decorative models and disposable toys.

The advantages would be that the machine can run on paper waste, common household glue and ordinary inkjet cartridges, all readily available and cheap. That's assuming the whole idea works, of course.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And is worthwhile.
PPS - It's probably a bit too narrow a niche to be useful.

A TARDIS keyring

I made myself a TARDIS keyring yesterday. Because of the size, it's not that detailed, and it's not quite completely dried yet, but soon. Soon.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's also pretty rough.
PPS - Also, the camera flash made the blue seem lighter than it is.

Friday Flash Fiction - Apocalypse is a word for "heart"

They strolled clockwise around the rusted, piled-up car bodies that formed the wall of the city. They were looking for shelter, for food, for anything useful they might sell to get either of those things. Maurice and Janet were not the first to pick over this section. They never were.

Maurice made an excited noise and hopped over to dig a car hood out of the dirt. "Would you look at that! The apocalypse just skipped a beat! We can add this to our roof!"

As pleased as she was to find a piece for shelter, Janet rolled her eyes. The day when Maurice didn't make five or six jokes about his heart being called "apocalypse", well, the world really would end. He once told her that he wished they still had defibrillators so he could get shocked by one and say that someone had kick-started the apocalypse.

The man who would be king inside the city called it "Jericho", ignorant of the Biblical implications. He just liked the name. He didn't like Maurice. At all. Janet could have gone inside, probably even to the "palace", with warm beds and hot food, or so she had heard. She wouldn't go alone, though. She knew what happened to lone girls who went into the city.

Janet caught a few rats to eat, and they dug up some flammables, too, so at least there would be cooked meat for dinner. As they picked the meat off tiny bones that evening, looking at Jericho over the sunset, Janet wondered if it was worth it. Maurice was right - Jeremiah, king of Jericho was not a good guy on a good path. One day he'd be overthrown, from inside the city or outside, it didn't matter. Things would change, then.

Janet watched Maurice sleep under his leather and hessian patchwork blanket, snoring softly after dinner was done. She saw, as if for the first time, the lines on his face, and realised he might not see the day when Jericho returned to him, though it was his by birthright. Birthright didn't matter in this place, or Maurice never would have been thrown out at all.

It was time. Now or never. Janet found Maurice's old travelling cloak and walking stick. She couldn't leave him a note, couldn't tell him she was going, because he'd try to stop her, but there were other nomads around Jericho now. She had seen their fires in a wide circle around the city. She was determined to rally them against Jeremiah.

Before she left him, asleep, she kissed his cheek and put her hand on his chest, to feel the beat of his heart. We'll get this, she thought to herself. We'll take back the city before the apocalypse stops. And with that, she walked into the night, towards the cooking fires of the other nomads.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I seem to have been having a motif or theme lately.
PPS - I'm sure it will pass.

Science tools that are not available to laypeople

It's easy to ask questions that household science can't answer. For example: how tall can a tower of LEGO be before it collapses under its own weight? Well, it's easy to see that we need to know the weight that will crush a LEGO brick, the weight of each brick and the height of a brick. Given that, the maths is easy, and we can measure the height and weight of a single brick relatively easily, even if we have to combine several of them and divide to get an accurate measurement. What is much harder to do, with tools from around the house, is to measure the weight that will crush a single LEGO brick. For that, you need some kind of force scale that can crush the brick and tell you how much force was used. Not so easy, and a critical missing piece. Quite often, it is not possible for people to do their own science, and that is a problem.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Inspired by this BBC News article about the tallest possible LEGO tower.
PPS - I'm not sure what could be done about it.

Influences

I don't like to think of myself as easily influenced - none of us do - but when I look at it objectively, I'm pretty easy to push around if you know what you're doing. Take, for instance, my personal habits and state of mind compared to the TV shows I'm watching. When we were watching a lot of Psych, I was profiling strangers on the train, noticing things like cat hairs on their shirts, chipped nail polish, and cheap shoes with an expensive bag. When we were catching up on shows like The Big Bang Theory, Bones, Alphas or anything else with someone a bit socially awkward and literal, or flat-out autistic, I became much more stubbornly literal too. Now that we've started Burn Notice from the beginning, I'm eating yoghurt. When I first saw Terminator 2 in high school, I spent weeks perfecting an imitation of Robert Patrick's running style, and I learned the Verbal Kint cripple shuffle from The Usual Suspects, too.

So all it really takes is showing me something kind of cool, or some way to be different by copying something else. Sometimes it's as if I don't have a personality of my own, just a bunch of random habits and quirks that I picked up from TV, movies and friends. Even my writing style starts to take on similar traits to the authors I'm reading at the time. My love of movies and my zombie obsession were borrowed from coworkers and an ongoing office joke respectively.

Basically, sometimes I wonder if there's anything here that's really me, or if I am just a collection of social pressures and complicated tics.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm just wondering about individuality and conformity.
PPS - Of course, it's unlikely for me to have discovered anything I like on my own.

I might not need Amazon.com.au

Do I really need Amazon to open amazon.com.au any more? The only things I really buy from Amazon are books, and since I got a Kindle, the main way I buy them is in digital format, which ships instantly over the internet. So for that, I don't need an Australian Amazon.

On the other hand, the reason I don't buy other things from Amazon is mostly the shipping costs. It's much cheaper to buy things in Australia, or from other local online vendors. If Amazon opened an Australian domain, with Australian warehouses and domestic shipping charges, I might buy more from them.

The other reason I don't tend to buy physical goods from Amazon is region-specific vendors and goods. Some things - even simple things like some lint-free tea towels - can't be shipped to Australia at all, and other goods like DVDs are only available in USA region-locked formats. An Australian operation would fix those problems.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Come to think of it, I haven't shopped online in a while.
PPS - Perhaps my needs have changed lately.

Is it the future yet?

I like to do this on the new year - look at the current state of technology and see where we're at - but I'm not aware of any significant advances in consumer technology over the past year. Anything I'd write about - tablet computers, 3D printing, ebooks - was already the case at the beginning of 2012. What's up with that?

The one thing I do know that's happened is that there is now a streaming video service in Australia with a monthly subscription fee, but a very limited catalogue.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's progress.
PPS - But our tech landscape is still controlled by a very small group of people.