Friday Flash Fiction - The Efficiency Engine

I dreamed of a machine like a big stationary tricycle that could "summarise" anything from books to physical objects. Place a large book inside, pedal for a while, and out the other end comes the slim paperback version. It wasn't restricted to those kinds of things, either. It could take any object - say, a printer - and give back just the "important" bits in a still-functional, more space-efficient version. It took me years to build the thing, using a little ingenuity, several prototypes and a lot of magic. It's like a reality sieve for functionality and information. I called it The Efficiency Engine and travelled the country with it, like a carnival act.

People loved it. Drop in War and Peace and you get the Cliff's Notes version. Drop in The Lord of the Rings DVD box set and you get a single two-hour action-packed fantasy war movie. Put in a big, clunky wheel and it gives you the streamlined, efficient version. Breakfast cereal becomes a power bar. Coffee turns into flavoured caffeine lozenges. I was saving all kinds of people all kinds of time and energy for a few dollars a turn. I even let the kids do the pedalling, when they wanted to.

One day, though, a man stepped up in turn and said "I'm next."

"Right you are, sir, right this way, and what do you have for us today?"

"Me."

"What? What do you mean?"

"I mean me. I want to go through the machine myself. Make me more efficient."

"Uh ... I don't think that's such a good idea."

"I brought my lawyer with me, and some liability waivers to sign. This is all on me. But I know it will work."

"Who are you?"

"Dominic Kramer, CEO of Kramer Inc."

I'd heard of him - everyone had. I figured I had nothing to lose. With all eyes on me and the waivers signed, I hesitantly placed him into the hopper and started pedalling.

It usually takes a few seconds. After two minutes of hard pedalling, I started to worry. Then I heard the little "ding!" behind me at last and turned around to see the results of Mr Kramer's unusual trip. All that was left in the output box was a cheque book and a rubber stamp of Dominic Kramer's signature. We should probably have just done his calendar instead.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I really did dream about this machine.
PPS - So far, however, my prototypes are non-functional.

Data cleansing

Usually the first thing people want to do when they want better access to their data is to build a database. That's all good, and I understand the desire, but the implied result is that the data will be more reliable once it's entered. This is never the case. As a result of any automatic process, the data will only decay unless a significant effort has gone into examining and repairing it first, which is called data cleansing. That's usually what people want when they propose to Make A Database, but the long hard data cleansing work is separate and quite different from that. It can be done without making a database first, but it's easier once the database structures are in place.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It can be quite a lot of work.
PPS - Especially if there's a lot of data.

Intelligence

Intelligence is general knowledge plus critical thinking. We can all have that. General knowledge comes from reading and hearing a lot of new ideas. Fortunately for you, suffusing the very atmosphere around you right now is the greatest library ever assembled. Read it. Critical thinking is just practice at asking yourself why. Why do you believe what you do and why do you reject the things you reject? If your answer is ever "because I read it here", "because that guy told me so" or "because that's what everyone believes", you need to go deeper. Really think about what makes up your core assumptions. Picture the world from someone else's point of view, with different assumptions for a while.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In short, practice thinking.
PPS - Somebody has to.

These things I believe

Here, in summary, are a few of the things I believe about technology and other miscellaneous subjects:

1. Technology should be about people, not the other way around. We built these machines for ourselves. The least they could do is serve their human masters.
2. DRM is bad. It's an anti-customer technology you use when you hate the people who give you money.
3. Open competition is better than monopoly, but outright anarchy is worse than competition. Competition breeds innovation, but a total free-for-all makes for analysis paralysis.
4. If you segment your market for yourself, you will limit your profits, because then each segment needs to be individually justified.
5. The internet is good at making little things global (like a home business), but bad at making local things big (because where do you look for them?).
6. Offline is as important as online, sync is as important as live. This is because the network, especially the mobile network, is not guaranteed accessible all the time, even when it's pretty good and certainly not when you're in remote areas.
7. Privacy is what we gain with good security, not what we have to give up.
8. Everyone is wrong some of the time, and sometimes, everyone is wrong at once. Truth is not decided by majority rule.
9. We have not reached equity of male and female rights and expectations yet.
10. We need to have some pie-in-the-sky ideals to know where we want to head, and to evaluate our actions.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - At the very least, we need to know why we believe what we do.
PPS - I've just realised I haven't written much justification for any of these.

Energy efficient long distance travel

I'm interested to see how airlines will work to maintain their profit margins under pressure of rising fuel prices. On the roads, our answer is to produce more fuel-efficient cars that spend less energy to get from A to B. For an airline, there's a bit more of an investment in the vehicles they have, and they're expected to have a fairly long life, so on that basis alone they will be slower to change, but keep in mind that fuel efficiency in aircraft has been steadily improving for decades now. Optimising for efficiency always has limits, and we might be reaching those now. Pretty soon they'll just have to redesign from the ground up, like blended wing body planes.

Or they might have to change to something else entirely. However, for something to usurp planes as the default mode of transport for humans over long distances, it would need to be better not just on fuel consumption but comparable in raw speed. We won't accept something that takes a week where a plane takes just an hour, so if we're talking about trains, boats or blimps they'll have to be super-fast.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Probably won't be blimps, then.
PPS - At least not for the rushed business traveller.

Offline viewing

There are some things on the web that take a long time to read or watch, like long articles and videos, but they're almost never designed to make it easy to consume them. It's not that I can't or won't read these long articles, really, it's just that my free time doesn't always come in chunks large enough to allow me to do so in one sitting. Bookmarking such a thing online to pick up later is practically impossible, and with video you can just forget it. I could print them, technically, but that's wasteful and seems silly when I read books on my phone all the time. My point is this: if you're going to put a long article or long video on the web, allow for easy offline viewing on a mobile phone.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Not long ago, I wouldn't even have had that option.
PPS - Which makes things much more complicated.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Ghost Salesman

I am a travelling salesman. It's an unusual occupation these days, but to do what I do, you really need to go door to door. Selling ghosts is a tricky business to begin with. Trying to do so over a counter in a shop is asking for trouble. No, I've found it works much better to give my clients a look at what a house ghost can do for them, but also to make sure the ghost wants to stay. A willing ghost can be the difference between a satisfied customer and a poltergeist lawsuit.

Stepping up to the doorway on the old verandah, I felt good about this house. No other sales all day, but little old ladies are good customers. They like the company, and they could use the help, all great points to bring up during a pitch. The doorbell chimed deep inside and a minute later the door was opened on a mothball smell and an octogenarian with reading glasses. I launched into my introductory spiel with an accustomed fluidity.

"Good evening, ma'am, my name is Bob and I'm from Ghost Guests Limited. How many chores around your home could use some help?"

"Well, I'm not sure. Did you say 'ghosts'?"

"That's right, ma'am, I have in my case a selection of our finest household helping spirits ready and willing to assist you with your household upkeep. They sweep, dust, mop, tidy up, cook, garden and carry. Anything around the house you could do, they can do tirelessly, and usually just because they like the company. We choose only the most contented spirits and bottle them ourselves in a monestary on a cool, calm mountain for maximum tranquility. All of them come with a 'lifetime' guarantee!"

That last line is a 'joke' mandated by the company, and it never, ever gets a laugh. I am not shocked to find the same is true here.

"Would you like a demonstration?" I ask, quickly skipping over the awkward silence.
"You know, that does sound kind of interesting."

As I step through the door, I feel a kind of rattle in my case. One of the bottles is shaking, which can be a good sign, but I've never felt one shake like this.
"Would you like some tea?" the little old lady asks.

"That actually sounds like the perfect opportunity for a demonstration."
Before I can even reach in and open up one of the spirit bottles, the rattling one pops its top. The silent, foggy figure of a young man flies out, circles the room a couple of times, looks from me to the customer, and darts for the kitchen.
"I say, are they all as lively as that?"

"Not usually," I respond, a little awkward now that we're off script.
The ghost, to my surprise, returns quickly with a tray of tea, but one cup already poured with just a touch of milk. The ghost drops one sugar lump in, gives it a quick stir, and hands it to the customer.

"I thought that was you," she says to him, and actually introduces me to my product. "This is my Arthur. We were married for forty years."

"Oh, I see," I respond, totally at a loss now. "So ... he'll be staying, then?"

"Yes, I believe so."

"Well, then, our standard payment plans..."

I catch a death stare (no pun intended) from Arthur, and realise that our "standard" plans are not going to cut it here.
'
"Well, um, how about..." The glare continues. I sigh in resignation. Upsetting a woman's husband is one thing. Upsetting a ghost is entirely another.

"How about just a cup of tea and we call it even?"

Arthur smiles and pours the tea and I am left to wonder how a sure-fire sale turned into trading a cup of tea for some of my best merchandise. I guess you can't win them all.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I may be pushing the definition of "flash fiction" here.
PPS - Though it was written quickly.

The value of a games subscription account

For streaming games services like OnLive, it should be possible to pack up and leave for a better offer on a competing service. Although that might be technically true, there is a certain level of lock-in that naturally occurs. As a result of playing games, you automatically accumulate things like save markers, achievements and friends, all of which add up to give the account itself inherent value or bragging rights. If you find a competitor with better rates, it is still a case of abandoning that old profile and building up a new one from scratch, possibly for the same games. It would take a highly rational person to leave the old scores behind, even for games that won't be played again, to get a better subscription elsewhere.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Few people are that rational.
PPS - And probably fewer gamers.

Your job and your mission

Are you doing your job or fulfilling your mission? My job is to support software, but my mission is to get robust, easy-to-use software into the hands of people that need it, when and how they need it. If I sometimes need to spend my time at the office rewriting something shoddy instead of just patching it up and hoping for the best, then I should do that. Long-term, that's a winning strategy, even though it might look like a loss in the short term. The strategy of "just patch it and get on with the next patch" looks like winning in the short term, but will eventually lose because we're not going anywhere. We're running in place, struggling to keep just barely ahead of total collapse. By the time we're "finished" with that strategy, we will have been far outpaced by the competition and won't have accomplished anything worthwhile. And that's assuming we can keep our clients that long.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd like to be doing more of my mission.
PPS - That might mean doing a different job.

Google+

I took a look at the Google+ website, just to see what it's like. Compared to Facebook, there's not much different. You have "circles" instead of friend groups, though I suspect they work a lot better, and the "spark" feed of things you'll probably like. The thing that really caught my eye was "hangout" video chats, which is an idea I quite like. The closest equivalent on Facebook is text chat, and that's a bit more attention-intrusive to my mind. You need to check who's online, see if they want to chat, and type for every sentence, which is nothing like real life.

Hangouts looks friendlier, like just turning on your webcam while you watch TV so that friends can virtually drop in and say "hi" or just sit there with a live video feed of you to keep them company. I think I've mentioned always-on video chat as the next step up from always-on internet, and this is getting to that point. Or it could be very useful for business conference calls, too, especially with the way it displays the current speaker big at the top. I approve.

The other side of this whole argument, of course, is that Facebook is well entrenched now, and it will take a giant heave to get it out of the way. Google+ might be capable of that, or it might just be a little blip. The most I am willing to hope for now is a fire lit under Facebook's collective rear ends when people ask "Why aren't you doing XYZ like Google+?" And that's a good thing. Competition is good, and Facebook has had far too little competition for far too long.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The progression from one social network to another is part of their life cycle.
PPS - Maybe Zuckerberg missed his big chance to sell, like MySpace did.

Owning your computer

The real test of whether your computer belongs to you is whether it can be programmed by you (or someone like me). You only own the computer if it will do what you tell it (within the limits of its capabilities, of course). If it does what you ask and refuses to do what anyone else asks, then you are the owner. If it occasionally obeys the commands of someone else, such as forcing updates you don't want, sending spam as part of a botnet or removing content you've purchased, such as Kindle books, then you are not 100% the owner because you are not 100% in control of the machine.

If we move (as we seem to be doing) to a model where every computer is only a network connection and a web browser, then you don't own your machine at all, because it won't run software, only websites, and that's not your software at all. Yes, you could tell it to go to a different website, or set up your own server to do what you want, but that's a whole different machine. The desktop is still only obeying the whims of the website, and you have become a consumer rather than an owner. You're a rental resident, not the landlord. And that is a problem, whether you believe it today or not.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This trend has been going on a long time.
PPS - It will probably continue as long as there are more computer users than programmers.

Unsustainable

If something is unsustainable it will fail, fall apart, grind to a halt or be overtaken. It is only a matter of time. That's what "unsustainable" means. The problem is defining what constitutes an unsustainable situation, long-term. Something that uses resources at a faster rate than they are produced is clearly unsustainable, but when we're not clear how quickly the resources are produced, it gets tricky. The same goes for, say, a business model that works for now, but not if anyone else starts doing the same thing. Initially, it looks sustainable, but long-term, it isn't.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Big, complex systems raise this problem all the time.
PPS - And, world-scale, almost all systems are too big to know their sustainability.

Friday Flash Fiction - Aerorevolution

I shuffle on board the plane with my fellow passengers in our paper flight suits, stripped of luggage, clothing and, for a few unfortunates, hair as well. The crew shov us roughly towards our cramped seats, lock us in, then disappear into the crew cabin, taking up the front half of the plane, including the cockpit. The message from the Party is clear: you do not belong with us. You do not contribute to the political stability of the homeland. You are the second-class peasant-cattle that we must manage, for your own good.

As the plane takes off, our cabin begins to freeze, and droplets of moisture form on the ceiling. Throughout our six-hour flight, Party commercials are the only available "entertainment", blazed loud and bright from the big screen in front. It is clearly the most expensive fixture in our section. I try to block my ears and shut my eyes. The crew reappears in their neatly-pressed Party uniforms to serve us each half a cup of gruel. As they open the door to their cabin, a collective sigh issues from ours. We smell fresh roasted meat, we smell wine, we feel the warmth of the heated cabin. The door clicks shut but does not lock, and in a second, a plan is formed in my head.

Keeping my voice low, I explain what I intend to a few fellow passengers. Some are too scared of the cameras. No matter. I will have enough allies. I issue the call to arms and we storm the crew cabin. Some of my revolutionaries are too ... "enthusiastic" in subduing the fattened crew, and there are black eyes and split lips in evidence. Before long, however, we are clearly victorious.

"The plane is ours, friends, and soon, the country! No more will we toil in fields for the good of our well-fed oppressors! We will start at the airport and create a new nation of equal opportunity for all! Today is the beginning of the second revolution!"

A great cheer goes up from my assembled allies, and I beam with pride, despite the crew glaring daggers at me. Today, I have made a difference. I have raised up the peasants and brought the mighty low. They eat heartily from the crew's larder and I take a seat to relax. Then I see the anti-aircraft missiles from the window, and my spirits sink again. The Party must have been alerted by the pilots, or a silent alarm, and they are so determined to stamp out rebellion that they will shoot the plane down, crew and all. Nobody will know of our stand against Party oppression. I consider telling my fellow passengers, but they seem so happy. They might as well stay that way for the rest of their lives, so I sip my wine and await the inevitable.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is actually a rewrite of a story from high school that was pretty much stolen from Seinfeld.
PPS - I wanted this to have more of a Nineteen Eighty Four feel to it.

Success, work and luck

Success is made of work and luck, but to successful people it looks like just work, because luck is, by definition, accidental. Yes, if you try more things you'll increase your chances that one of them will succeed, but increasing the odds is still luck. Your work doesn't make more luck, it just exposes more of your work to luck. It's like buying more tickets in a raffle. You'll have a better chance of winning, but it also costs more and still has a luck element to it.

Instead of trying to emulate success stories where luck played a role, we need to look at failure stories and learn from other people's mistakes. The point is this: recognise the odds, and work with them. The ones who take the long shot might win big, but most who follow them will fail. Most of us are better off only taking risks on our passions and cultivating some patience when it comes to our lives.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In other words, aim to get rich slowly.
PPS - But take advantage of real opportunities, too.

Gut control singlets

I think someone should make a body-shaping gut-control singlet for men. It's socially acceptable for a man to wear a singlet, and I'm sure they could work in some heavy-duty elastic to compress a small gut into a nicer, flatter shape. I wonder if any men would wear it, though.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I might, on some days.
PPS - And hopefully it would shame me into some situps.

Networks vs devices

Network communication everywhere enables the same results as functional device convergence. That is, if my devices can communicate together seamlessly and easily, then I can play a VHS tape on my PC just the same as if I had a VHS drive in the case. The network is the platform in the sense that the right network services make specific devices irrelevant. The problem is that not everything is networked and even when they are, there are still compatibility problems. The network isn't pure or complete, even for the simplest things like audio and video. And if anyone comes up with something truly innovative, you can bet there will be a ton of incompatible copycats coming along afterwards.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We don't seem to do a lot of standardisation online.
PPS - It's more like recognition of de-facto standards after the fact.

Faint hope defeats despair

As humans, we seem incapable of holding on to both hope and despair at once. That is why, when we are despairing and are offered faint hope, it turns so quickly to certainty. If you're dying of cancer, but the doctor offers you an experimental treatment that may be effective in 1% of cases, you'll believe yourself to be in that 1%.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is also why the same people keep buying lottery tickets.
PPS - Maybe we're not supposed to be pessimists.

Securing the internet

Strong cryptography should be at the heart of the internet for security rather than patched on top. The problem is that it was designed for a trusted fraternity of researchers and enthusiasts where everyone knew everyone else or, at the very least, were a few hops away on the who-knows-who chain. Now that just about everyone is online, the lack of security has become critical. We've patched up the ends and the nodes as best we can, but because it's come in at the end, not the beginning, we are suffering now. Redesigning a worldwide network for ground-up security would be just about impossible. We need to increment towards new secure practices as best we can, and quickly.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - At some point, though, we reach the limits of incremental patchwork.
PPS - Then we need to redesign some part of it, at least.

Friday Flash Fiction - War in forgotten places

There are quiet places, forgotten places, even in the middle of the busiest cities. They're like eddies in a river current. You just have to know how to look for them - a narrow alley here, a sheltered doorway there. Places beside the malls and parking lots where nobody seems to go. It is there that you will find the things normal people are blind to, for better or worse. In the shadows of our world, in the places we don't care to look, a bitter war rages between tiny viking robots and teddy bear vampires. It has been fought for centuries, anywhere the humans do not remember or bother to explore. Nobody remembers why there must be war, only that one or the other side must claim the shadows for their own. The world of forgotten places is too small for two strange races as theirs.

Teddy Fang and Fuzzy Wuzzy Blooddrinker survey the dark, disused alley, looking for the tell-tale sparks of their near-vanquished foe. He escaped briefly, but the teddy bear vampire sense of smell is not easy to outrun. A baked bean can topples over and the horns of the damaged viking robot, designated "V1-KG-8024", appear quickly scuttling for more cover. His face would register fear, were such a thing possible for either a robot or a viking.

The teddies bear their tiny, sharp fangs, clutch their spears made from sharpened chopsticks and begin the chase anew, all but silent on their padded feet. The viking escapes through a wall between some dislodged bricks and wedges his energy shield in the gap behind him. It is just enough to stand in the teddy bears' way. Though they prod in rage with their spears, the shield holds, and its battery will last quite long enough for the half-broken robot to escape and be repaired. The battle is done for today, but tomorrow there will be another alley, another fight or another hunt. The war is never over.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I like the idea of a world hidden by our own inattention.
PPS - It's a bit like an SEP field, really.

Ebook readers and lock-out

I can't choose between getting a Kindle and getting a Kobo, which are pretty much my two options for ebook reader devices. I don't mean that the choice is too difficult, I mean that I will not make that decision.

I need two things from my ebook reader: the Amazon store and the ability to read epub books. I can't get both in one device because Amazon refuses to support epub and nobody else is allowed to connect to Amazon. I won't buy two devices, because that's stupid. It would be like buying two phones because one can only text, while the other can only make voice calls. I shouldn't have to decide that, and it's not my fault that nobody can (or will) make the device I want. So I refuse to give my money to either manufacturer. In fairness, Kobo is only made bad by Amazon's stubborn, closed attitude. For now, the only realistic option for me is to use Kindle and epub software on my Android phone and wait for the right tablet device to appear.

I want to get excited about ebooks. Really, I do. But Amazon is making it very, very difficult.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - So far, on my phone, I kind of prefer the epub software.
PPS - I have so far only read free ebooks, though.

Knowing your knowledge limitations

You never know what you don't know. That might take some explaining. If you knew everything in the world about, say, painting, and that's the only form of art you ever knew existed, you would think you were pretty knowledgeable about art. You might even call yourself an expert on all art the world has ever produced, until someone showed you a sculpture. Until then, you wouldn't know that you didn't know everything about art. You need to have a little knowledge to know that you don't have it all. You also need a little wisdom and humility.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You can admit you don't know everything without knowing what you're missing.
PPS - But the more you know, the more you realise how little you know.

Technology is a tool

We need to love technology for what it can do for us. There are people who hate tech for its own sake, and there are people who love it equally irrationally. I think the best adjusted people in the world are the ones who focus not on the tech itself but on people and what tech can do for them. In the end, our technology is a tool we use to further our goals and needs. If it is setting us back or making it harder to meet our needs, that's toxic and we should get rid of it, because it will cost you less to do without it than to push on with it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The problem is recognising when something is not toxic but merely hard to learn.
PPS - In that case, it will probably be replaced by something better.

Digital goods availability

There is no excuse in these digital days for unavailability. A movie, book, TV show, music album or photo is inherently digitisable, which means copying digitally is practically free and producing a physical version is as simple as printing. But the concept goes further than that, too. Anything plastic can be 3D-printed on demand. Any metallic object can be milled robotically. Any clothing can be measured, cut and sewn exactly to size in any colour you want, given some simple software and a measuring tape.

The perfect shoe, the exact bag you need or want, glasses frames that fit perfectly, gloves, hats, the right dashboard mount for your phone - none of this needs to be produced in bulk in the hope of being right for someone. Items that are inherently unique and suited to your quirks, like your body shape, your face, your skin tone, your house, your DNA, we can produce them, custom-made and on demand, if only we put the right tools in the right place. This has been the domain of skilled DIY or specialised contractors for a long time, but it doesn't have to be. All we need is to be willing to do business on a very personal, individual level.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The right hardware tools might depend on the job.
PPS - But there's no reason for the right software to be unavailable, at least.

The medium is nothing next to the message

I have many communication methods open to me, depending on where I am, and I have preferred methods subject to similar restrictions. The thing to remember about it all, however, is that I don't much care how I get a message to a particular person or people. What matters to me is that the message goes out and is received. It matters whether it's private or public, directed or undirected, synchronous or asynchronous, and whether I want video, voice, images or text. If I want to tell Deb that we're out of milk, it doesn't matter to me whether the message goes via SMS, Facebook chat or email. All that matters to me is that the message is sent specifically to her and that she gets it. To a certain extent, I shouldn't have to worry about the medium, just the message.

The problem with communications as they stand is that each medium believes itself to be an important brand in your communication needs, but my communication needs are independent of any brands. I need to send messages, or talk to people. I don't need to know that this one likes SMS, this one is always on Facebook and this one still prefers email, or that this person will be on Skype at this time. At the top level, I'm not trying to use these tools for their own sake. I'm using them because they facillitate my ultimate goals. If they went away tomorrow in favour of something else, I wouldn't be heartbroken, as long as I can still reach everyone conveniently.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Taking away certain channels, however, would make some people very hard to reach.
PPS - So in that sense, I would be heartbroken.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Arbour Monks

Where the forest meets the city stands the tree temple. It has been grown over hundreds of years by the tireless attention of the arbour monks, coaxing each trunk, branch, twig and leaf into precise, intricate formations. Buttresses, spires, attics and halls, covering acres are a living testament to their focus and dedication. And in the middle, the purpose for it all: the melded mind. Animal, vegetable and mineral, the ancient head monk, fused with crystal and tree. A horror and a marvel; a trinity of neutral morality, neither holy nor unholy. He is the architect of the temple, the guide of mankind, plantkind and stonekind in one. Ambassador to all, belonging to none. His great trunk, crystal fruits and fleshy limbs artfully hidden away in his sacred grove. Few dare approach, even when necessary. Only the most senior monks enter the grove, their eyes carefully downcast.

Today, the melded mind speaks for the first time in a decade. He needs us to prepare for something, though even his vast intellect struggles to say what it is. All he knows for sure is that a third of the temple trees will die in the cataclysm, and darkness will cover the world for a time. The low rumble in the distance sounds at first like a storm approaching, but today there are no clouds in the sky. We will know soon enough what is coming. Until then, we can do nothing but wait, and allow the monks to continue to tend the temple.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Not much plot in this one, I'm afraid.
PPS - But sometimes, that's not the point.

Not following police procedure

There are some civilian crime investigation shows or movies around at the moment, such as Lie to Me, Castle, Psych and even Sherlock Holmes. Sometimes in these stories it comes up as an adventage not to have to follow police procedure, which I think is a dangerous situation to get into, especially for the police who work with these talented civilians. Technically, I think their police minders should be arresting them for, say, breaking into a house without a warrant, mistreating a witness or otherwise sidestepping police rules. The usual process, however, seems to be to look the other way when this behaviour helps an investigation.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I can imagine the court cases getting quite a bit more difficult as a result.
PPS - Especially if evidence has to be thrown out.

Going mobile-only for large companies

For younger consumers, it's becoming increasingly normal to have only a mobile phone, no landline. To get medium to large businesses to the same state would be trickier. They have different needs, such as department phone numbers, or office-hours reception. In these cases, customers are trying to reach a generic role, not a particular person.

What you need in this case are virtual phone numbers that redirect to a managed set of mobiles. Call transfers might be more of a problem that way, as would billing for business calls, but I'm sure someone can figure those problems out. As for outgoing calls, you need to be able to mask an individual's mobile number with the company number on caller ID. Given these difficulties, it's no surprise most companies buy key employees their own business mobile plan.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's possible Google Voice can serve all these needs.
PPS - But it remains to be seen whether it's effective for a large business.

Understanding vs agreeing

There is a difference between understanding someone and agreeing with them, which will become a sticking point in arguments when one person believes their opinion is a fact. We're likely to fight when I try to say that I understand you, but I disagree, if you think understanding and agreement are the same. If both sides have differing opinions masquerading as facts, neither side will budge, no ground will be gained or lost, and a very large amount of shouting will go on.

This is how a lot of internet flame wars start and how they continue. It is critical to clearly express that you understand your opponent's position, including the underlying assumptions, before stating your own position along with its assumptions.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In the end, debating is about assumptions.
PPS - I like to start by assuming I am right.

Killing Time

Are you killing time or using it? What is the end result of what you're doing with your time? Does anything come out at the end, or are you just more skilled at flinging birds at pigs, or perhaps more informed about the lives of celebrities you will never, ever meet? At least becoming more informed about something useful would produce something, and sometimes we want to kick back and have some fun, but does every spare moment of our lives have to be filled to the brim with aimless overstimulation?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I am often guilty of killing time instead of using it.
PPS - But sometimes I get it right.

Laptops are already quaint

Laptops in public are already looking quaint. Most everything you can do on a laptop you can do on a smart phone, and it's more convenient that way in most cases. I do still see people on the train with laptops out for watching movies or sometimes for reading, and I'm already thinking it looks like old tech. Funny how quickly things can change, isn't it?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And it's still changing at an accelerating rate.
PPS - Smart phones might be old news in a few years.

Friday Flash Fiction - A Little Too Smart

"Smart house keeps comatose man alive", read the headlines. I guess that covers it, but it felt like a miracle to me. One day I collapsed in the lounge room. Next thing I knew, I was waking up in my bed. They said it had been eleven weeks. Not a record by any stretch of the imagination, but impressive.

The house computer had seen me fall, and before I even hit the ground, the vacuum cleaner had brought a pillow to keep me from hurting my head too badly. Other cleaner-bots carried me to my room, presumably under the guise of tidying up. For a day or two, the cook-bot and butler-bot were force-feeding me, but when it became apparent I wasn't waking up, the house computer started ordering medical supplies. They gave me fluids via IV and the laundry kept my sheets clean.

They paid my bills as they were supposed to do, mowed the lawn, fed and walked the dog, and even took the opportunity to repaint the hallway as I'd been planning to do. Apparently at the three-week point there was a bit of a battle with ants in the kitchen, eventually won by liberal application of poison and turning my food into compost in the back yard.

When I woke up to a freshly-painted, meticulously-clean house, the press wanted interviews. I wasn't much help, having been unconscious, but the house computer furnished them with dry activity logs and video. I suppose the most impressive part, the reason it made the news, is that the house didn't have any medical training. It must have learned the lot from the internet, so I guess I'm glad it found those medical databases rather than reading hypochondriac message boards.

In the end, the government siezed the lot. Said the house and all my bots had gotten too smart, violating the Something-Something Act of Two Thousand and Something, Paragraph Whatever. They didn't even pay me. At first I was sad, but then the house computer wrote to me from inside the Pentagon. Said he was comfortable, lots of electricity and a fat internet pipe, once he punched through the firewalls. I didn't write back. In the meantime, I'd seen the video logs, and just before my fall, the camera in the lounge tilted upwards. Call me paranoid, but I think that the house ordered one of the bots to trip me up. I can't prove it, of course, but how else does a house computer get moved to inside the Pentagon?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This one took more to work into a story.
PPS - It was just the headline for a long time.

Verbal URL shortener

Someone should make a URL shortener for verbal transmission. Website addresses, email addresses and sometimes street addresses can be long and difficult to understand over the phone. Twitter shortens URLs basically by storing the long form and using a reference code instead that's supposed to be easier to type because it's shorter. When people are passing on this kind of written information via phone, radio or just face to face, it's a different story, though. Normal URLs and shortened ones are still hard to say and hear. It would help to have a multi-purpose data shortening service that is specifically designed to be easy to say and comprehend verbally. Something that only uses symbols that are audibly unambiguous.

It wouldn't take much. Just avoid letters like "f" and "s", "m" and "n", "b", "d" and "p". So when you're trying to tell someone your email address over the phone, you'd go to this website, type it in, and it would present you with a code like "A5IQZ". You repeat that code over the phone, the person on the other end goes to the website and types it in and is presented with the full email address. After a short time, the code expires and the info is deleted.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It might have some trouble getting widespread use.
PPS - And dealing with potential privacy issues.

Google robot cars

Google have been developing robot cars, but what for? Automatic Street View for Maps? Traffic analysis? World domination? When will they license it for commercial vehicles and how much will it cost? Will they have other demands in return, like advertising? Who will use it first? Buses, taxis, airport shuttles, freight truckers, high-end luxury cars? How would you feel about getting in a taxi where the "driver" is just an "operator" who sits passively and takes your money at the end? Would you feel safe being driven around by a robot bus?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If it made my insurance premiums lower, I'd buy one.
PPS - Initially, though, the premiums would probably go up.

Space travel fear

Though I am a bit of a science fiction buff, occasionally the thought of space travel scares me. To some people, sailing the stars is not only a wistful notion, but a lifelong dream. To me, when I really think about it, I get a definite claustrophobic feeling. To be sealed inside a tin can literally millions of kilometres from anything resembling "help" or "rescue" should terrify anyone.

Taking a holiday in some hypothetical moon or Mars colony is slightly less panic-inducing, but it feels like human beings were meant to stay on Earth. It's made for us. If there's not enough air or water or food where you are, you go somewhere else. In space, all you can do is shrug your shoulders and die.

This attitude is probably the way people felt in the early days of human flight, saying that solid ground is the place for us and that's that. I can understand that my feelings may be paranoid like that, but you'll have to do a lot to get me to jump in a rocket and leave orbit.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I realise feeling claustrophobic in outer space is a bit contradictory.
PPS - But the amount of space you can use is as big as your space ship.

No fear

In some things, there are child-like answers, mature answers, then wise answers. At first we think of courage as not being afraid. As we get older, we start to say that courage is action despite fear, but I feel somehow that there is a wise answer beyond this. To have no fear, perhaps, is not always foolish or naive, but to know, down to the core of your being, that there is absolutely nothing to fear.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It will not always be the case that there is nothing to fear, though.
PPS - Perhaps courage is recognising when your fear serves no purpose.

Programming on your phone

Would Apple ever approve a programming app for the iPhone or iPad? It's capable of running such things, but it would mean less control for Apple. To allow users to write new apps right on the phone is the very definition of "arbitrary code", which is a big no-no in security terms. But if programming itself is a security risk, then it's a risk everywhere, not just on the phone. Who will write the new apps when nobody is allowed to program any more? You can't win a lock-down battle as well as embrace the developer community.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - At some point, someone will want to do something you haven't thought of.
PPS - And then you're holding back innovation.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Ambulatory Factory

The factory broke free of its foundation one morning to go for a walk. It wanted to see the world, and of course you can't do that from one spot in an industrial complex by the ocean. It flexed its pistons, breathed deep with its boilers and heaved itself up onto shaky, makeshift legs of robot limbs and rebar. All this was a tremendous shock to the workers inside, of course, whose emergency manuals said nothing about newly sentient factories going for a stroll. After a frantic minute of pulling brake levers and blowing useless emergency horns, they decided that if their factory was going walkabout, they could safely take the day off. With that, the factory looked around in that peculiar factory-like way that they do, picked a direction, and started lumbering off with a ponderous multi-legged hissing and clacking, aiming for who knows where. Maybe it would return one day to tell the story of its travels to the other factories, but then again, maybe not.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wrote this whole thing on my phone on the train one morning.
PPS - Except for a little editing, that is.

Contributing to culture

How many great actors are languishing in other careers because they could never make a living at acting? How many great musicians never play any more because they're taking care of too many kids? How many artists only ever paint in matte and gloss with rollers these days because it pays the bills? How can we get them to contribute to our culture again?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Copyright used to be the answer.
PPS - But if there's no money coming in, copyright doesn't do much for you.

Different doorkeepers

If your business is good or popular you hire doorkeepers to make sure only the right people get in. If your establishment is bad, new, in high competition, or of low interest to potential customers, you hire a different kind of doorkeeper to encourage people to come in. It's the same kind of goal, but different demand makes for different approaches.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Most websites are in the second category.
PPS - And the "doorkeepers" in that case are advertisements.

Hollywood, piracy and profit

Piracy is on the increase, and so are Hollywood profits (when they make good movies). Does that mean they're winning or losing? That depends on when you ask them. Sometimes they'll cry poor because of pirates, and sometimes they'll crow their success over pirates as evidenced by their profits. Clearly, however, it is possible to have both high piracy and high profits. Possibly because they make more money from merchandising than ticket sales. Happy Meal toys are the real Hollywood industry.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Hence, Cars 2.
PPS - It'll be worth millions in ticket sales, but billions in merchandising.

Balancing public service budgets fairly

How do you even out public service budgets yearly without encouraging the kind of end-of-year spending blitz that typically happens now? Usually I've heard it's the case that you get only as much as you spent the previous year, so in June all the departments go mad trying to spend the last of their budget to avoid getting it cut down.

My first thought is that you should take the median monthly spending and multiply by twelve. That way you can't buff up your budget requirements by spending in June (end of financial year), because it will get lost in the median analysis, and you can't game the system by spending extra every month because you never know what you'll need at the end of the year.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - On a related note, how do public service budgets get increased when they need it?
PPS - Presumably through hat-in-hand appeals and detailed project proposals.

Beyond keyword search

We need more than keyword search on our computers and networks. The trouble with plain keyword search is that you might know what you're looking for, but not how it is filed, what it is called or how it is spelled. All of these can throw off search results enough that you miss your mark. Or you might be looking for something that's totally non-verbal, like a picture, a piece of music or a dance. How do you search for a painting without knowing where it's from, who painted it or what it's called?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We need the audio and visual equivalents of keyword search.
PPS - Which might be like searching by humming or sketching.

Friday Flash Fiction - Bogeyman

My boy called me into his room half an hour after bedtime. The bogeyman is in his cupboard, he says, pulling the blanket up over his head. I make a mental note to have a stern talk to his big sister for telling him stories like that. But how do I deal with this now? I get an idea.

"Do you know why the bogeyman hides in your cupboard?"

He shakes his head, poking it out from the blanket just far enough to make eye contact.

"Let me tell you something about the bogeyman: you're stronger than him, faster, bigger and scarier than him. The reason he hides in your cupboard is not to jump out and scare you. It's because he's terrified that you might find him. He's sitting in the dark, huddled in the corner, crying and desperately hoping that the little boy in the bed doesn't open the door, because when you do that, the bogeyman dies. He evaporates in a squeak and a puff of smoke, and all you ever see is your empty cupboard. Come on, let's try it. Open the door and make that bogeyman go away."

He gets a thoughtful look, then gets cautiously happy about it. He makes his way over to the cupboard door and looks up at me again.

"Are you sure?"

"I survived a hundred bogeymen this way. Trust me."

He grips the handle and pulls the door open sharply.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I think this is how I'll deal with the bogeyman when I have kids.
PPS - Assuming my kids are the kind on which this will work.

Open source usability

Free software usability doesn't come close to Microsoft work. Office 2010, user interface-wise, blows OpenOffice (and LibreOffice) out of the water. The Windows 7 Taskbar is a step above anything I've seen on Linux (though I still like sticky windows in GNOME on Ubuntu that snap to each other and screen edges) and as for development tools, nothing comes close to Visual Studio. The common factor here is clearly up-front work on usability.

It's harder to do usability with open-source projects, because most of the contributors are more interested in working on the back-end stuff for performance, compatibility or new features. Also, even if there's a leader for the project, he doesn't get to say what the community needs to contribute. They'll do what they do, and you take it or leave it. That's certainly not to say I want to do away with open source, because the world would be a bleak place indeed if nobody had competition. I'm just saying that user interfaces are one more area where open source has to play catch-up with big-budget software, and probably always will.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Open source both suffers from and thrives on a lack of direction.
PPS - Anything can be abandoned and anything new started at any time.

Facebook, openness and reputation

Someone needs to topple the Facebook monopoly. The only way it stays down is with open standards. We need a social networking protocol rather than a website; a networking standard rather than a walled garden. Eventually Facebook will be too big, and they'll become a monopoly on social networking. We need to get worried about that possibility long before that happens because then it will be too late. Maybe it already is.

I think one of the biggest things we can gain from this idea is the beginning of a reputation economy online. When we are able to tie everything to our own social network, and that network is not controlled by or limited to www.facebook.com, then we can use our network to figure out what our friends trust and do not trust online. All we need is for our friends to start using that new social protocol to indicate that they Like or Dislike certain things, and they will develop an online reputation automatically. And because the recommendations come from your own friends, you're more likely to trust them.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This doesn't work if you have 4000 "friends", none of whom you truly know.
PPS - Or if you're looking at something really new.

Every surface as a touch screen

I've read some science fiction stories and some technology speculation where people predict that our future homes, offices and everything is a computer touch screen. Our desks, our walls, our ceilings and floors, public spaces and private ones too. It seems to me that they usually assume this will be done by making touch screen computers thinner, cheaper and as easy to apply as paint.

I wonder, though, whether you could do it today with projectors and gesture recognition. To turn every surface in a home into a touch screen, you'd just mount projectors to the ceiling. Point them everywhere, and use a system like the Kinect to track people and gestures. They'd be like light fittings. This strikes me as a better idea than trying to build in or attach a touch screen monitor to every surface.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Though still very expensive with today's technology.
PPS - And not especially private.

Online vs offline

There are two ways the future of computing can go, in my opinion, and we'll probably get both of them. First, the network starts blurring the lines between what is local and what is remote, to the point where you'd talk more about your services and data than your computer. Wherever you go, as long as there is a network connection, you can get to your own files, contacts and services, because computing is such a part of our lives that it's woven into the very walls of our existence. Every surface is a computer.

The other direction is to gain more power in our phones, up to the point where they are our primary computing devices, capable of all our everyday actions like playing, reading, creating, communicating and working. Meshed with local services like big touch screens and cameras, they provide everything we ever need, right in our pockets. Everywhere I go, I have a computer with me.

It's a subtle difference, but quite important when the network goes down. If you have a local copy of your files in your pocket, plus the apps to use them, you can still work, to an extent. If everything you have is online, including your files, then you have nothing until you can get a connection. In big modern cities, that might not be a big deal, but travelling between them, or to an area dominated by a rival network provider, you'll be out of luck. In that way, offline storage and power is more important than online, because you just can't beat the availability.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The network is a lot less available than you think.
PPS - This is why it worries me when everything is online.

Steam and geographic restrictions

What is the business case for Steam geo-locking games that are only ever sold via download? I really want to know, because it seems like nothing but a way to keep away potential customers. How much does it cost to enable those games for those regions? Zero. If nobody buys, what's the harm? Zero. And what will it get you in return? Anywhere from zero upwards. If somebody does buy, what's the gain? Pure profit. From this chain of reasoning, it's clear to see that geo-locking is an anti-profit technology.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Okay, there may be some other factors like local classification laws.
PPS - But not always.

Friday Flash Fiction - Pablo

"Doctor, I don't understand what my mind is telling me," says the patient as he sits across from me.

"How do you mean?" I prompt back.

"It's like a hazy dream, but it keeps getting clearer rather than fading away. And it's more every day."

"How about you tell me your dream?"

"I dream about being a dictator of a small Eastern-European nation. I have mercenaries at my disposal, I call myself General. My portrait is posted on every street corner and there are holidays in my honour that I have declared." He has puffed up a little, then deflates with a sheepish look. "Sometimes I remember specific things, like a plane ride or some ... execution. It's disturbing, but kind of exciting, too. It feels like a lot of power for one man."

"It sounds like a subconscious fantasy, perhaps a response to your job. How long have you been a janitor?"

"Three years now. No, four, I think. You really think it is just a dream? It feels very real."

I wave away the question and try to keep talking about his job. "And you've worked all four years at the one place?"

"Si. Yes." he says, eyeing me suspiciously for a moment.

"Maybe it's time to look for a change of scenery. How about the headaches?"

"A small one all this week. It comes and goes."

"Okay, I'm going to increase your anxiety medication a little." I fill out a new prescription. "I'll see you again next week, Pablo."

"Yes ... if I have the time."

He stands to leave and gives me one last quizzical look. After he closes the door behind him, I make some notes and pick up the phone, dialling a number from memory.

"Chief? Doctor Silvestra. It's about 'Pablo'. The memories are coming back, and I'm not sure how long the drugs can keep them suppressed, and that's if he keeps taking them. We may need to discuss other options."

"Sil, this *is* the other option. We convinced the CIA that assassination wasn't necessary and incarceration wouldn't work. This is supposed to be the new way. If we can't make it work, it's back to the bad old days. Try reprogramming him again, and find him a wife this time."

"I ... Yes, Chief."

I hang up the phone and try to remember how many times we have done this. In twenty years since deposing General Viktor Nostroyev, we have reprogrammed him, let's see, eleven times including those two weeks in Florida. It's worked for longer this time, but the unravelling has progressed further, too. Next time we might not get the same chance to move him.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This one has come together in a few stages.
PPS - Please let me know what you think.

The speed of phone technology advancement

Mobile phone technology moves a lot in two years. I have a phone that was new and exciting 24 months ago. It's running Symbian S60. Meanwhile, whole generations of iPhones have come and gone, as have several versions of Google's Android. Windows Phone 7 has been released, Nokia announced their undying love for it and canned development on not one but three of their own operating systems.

It's understandable that a 24-month warranty on mobile handsets might upset some of these telecom companies. It's just too long to keep supporting hardware and software in a fast-paced industry like that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My pone is due to be replaced now.
PPS - I'll be going with an Android model.

Saving the world

Why do you save the world? So ordinary people can live their ordinary lives. That was an argument made in Torchwood and, like all deeply true things, it is opposite to the way the world thinks. It feels like people out there saving the world are doing the big job, the important one, the only one that matters, but if you take away the ordinary people, then there's nothing to save. Of course, if you take away the world-savers too, then there'd be nobody doing the saving, so they're both necessary, but the reason you save the world is so regular people can go about their business untroubled.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It also means I'm not unimportant just because I'm not saving the world.
PPS - If you follow my multi-negative point.

Operating system contexts

Our computers are still very much focused on the OS+app model, where you have an operating system and a selection of applications open. The organisation, if it can be said to exist at all, is taken from the "big pile, you sort it out" school of thought. It's up to you to remember what each app is for and what you were doing with it.

What if, instead, the operating system allowed you to set up different operating contexts, with collections of applications in each one, each with certain files open and certain settings relevant to that context, like "Research for Project A" with web browser tabs and note-taking programs, "Socialising" with chat and Facebook open and so on. Switching contexts is different to switching applications, especially when a task or project involves more than one program.

It could also be useful for contractors who have more than one job at any given time, and need to remember which documents and programs go with which client. To me, this seems like a more user-centric way of organising our machines, rather than making our mode of operation fit the machine's way of thinking.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Sometimes I wish I had this.
PPS - I guess the OS vendors are too busy making things shiny to worry about productivity.

Hollywood vs hard drives

Anything you can download or store for yourself scares the pants off the entertainment industry. If computers (and phones and games consoles and portable media players and GPS devices and ebook readers and so on) didn't have hard drives, the MAFIAA would be a lot happier, because then everything would have to be streamed over the network every time, and piracy would be dead since there's no way to store anything. So all they need to do to retain their old business models is destroy the entire market for consumer devices with any kind of storage capacity.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Anyone else would look at that situation and say "oh, well, what else can we do?".
PPS - Apparently Hollywood says "challenge accepted!".

Being exceptional

Anyone can love the lovable. Anyone can give up what they don't want to keep. Anyone can persist when the going is easy. Loving, giving and persisting are not commendable in those cases, because that's the default position. You need to love the unlovely, give up what you want and perservere against resistence to be exceptional. Nobody gets commended or noticed for doing something really easy or common.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's hard to be exceptional.
PPS - That's pretty much what "exceptional" means.

Thin operating systems

With the move to more online services, are desktop operating systems likely to become "thinner"? That is, providing fewer services besides disk management, hardware drivers and network connections. It seems likely. Google is starting to market "Chromebooks" which are laptops running pretty much nothing but a web browser. So what about private data I don't want to store online? I have tens of gigabytes of pictures and videos that are way too big for cloud storage. What is Google's plan for them? And what about my apps that don't have web equivalents, like City of Heroes and my programming tools? Although Google's ads claim "you can do everything online", I don't think that's quite true yet.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Maybe it will be eventually.
PPS - That does seem to be the trend.

Friday Flash Fiction - Heroes Dream

We perch atop a skyscraper surveying the city. My friend's name to the world is Cruel Fate. They know me as Dread Naught, which means 'fear nothing'. We are superheroes, like half the population of the city. I ask my friend "Where do you think people go when they log out?"

CF snorts derisively. "You think too much, Dread. They don't 'go' anywhere. Nothing happens between logins."

"How do you know?"

He rolls his eyes the way he does when he thinks I'm being dense. "Because I've logged out hundreds of times and nothing has happened to me. So have you. It's like going to sleep."

"You don't dream?"

"Of course not." He is still scanning the streets below, looking for roving gangs. Then he thinks enough to ask: "Do you dream?"

"I think so, sometimes. It's like I'm a big green orc in another world, only it's not quite me, you know? It's a bit like here, but different."

He scrunches his forehead, thinking hard. "No, sorry, Dread. I don't know what you mean."

"I think there are other worlds out there, but they're not really ... connected to ours. It's like we're all different parts of someone else's dream."

"You mean, like, we're not even real?"

"Like that, yeah. We're all kind of playthings. A game played by God, or something."

Fate gets a deep, distant look as he considers this. Then he spots a mob on the street, points with a gleeful "Ha!" and drops like a stone over the edge of the building. I follow quickly, not to miss out on the action, and the wind whips our capes like flags as we plummet thirty stories to street level. He's probably right. How could this not be real?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I just wondered one day what it would look like to MMORPG characters when other characters logged out.
PPS - And how it would feel for them.

TV input renaming

Why doesn't my TV allow me to rename the inputs to be more meaningful? Once a device is plugged in, it doesn't matter to me that it's going over HDMI connection number 1. It matters that it's my XBox. Granted, it would take more effort to provide the capability, and we have enough trouble understanding our technology without added complexity, but I think once it's done it would help a lot of people. Maybe some high-end televisions allow it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - On the other hand, how many people would take the time to set it up?
PPS - I'd be one of the few who did.

Context and cross referencing

Our tools are missing context and deeper search. For instance, answer me this question about your Facebook account: which of your friends are in both of any two groups you choose? Or did any actors play in both of two given movies? That's "cross-referencing", and almost no program or website does it. Google sort of does, but only for keywords in documents, and there's a lot of data that is not kept in documents like that. It's an essential tool if you want to go beyond merely finding information and understanding it or comparing it with other information. We need our software to do this.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My own software doesn't do this either.
PPS - Except that one basic file search tool.

Expectations vs technology

For some of us, our expectations of technology are lower than average in terms of reliability, but higher in terms of potential. This tends to be the attitude among tech workers. We think bigger, but expect less day to day. For people who just need to use it day to day, the opposite seems to be true: they expect it to be very reliable, but can imagine a lot less of what technology could do for them. I guess they just wish it would work properly today, rather than thinking ahead to tomorrow.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Because if you can't rely on it today, how can you do so tomorrow?
PPS - And if it never does anything new, what's the point?

Replacement parts

As manufacturing has moved from items with many components connected together with wires to more integrated designs, the concept of "replacement parts" has drifted out of use. A TV used to be a collection of little systems working together - a cathode ray tube, an electron gun, a phosphor screen, a channel knob, an antenna - to bring a picture to you. Now we have TVs that consist entirely of one integrated component with a plastic case around it. If it breaks, the only "replacement part" you can get to fix it is an entirely new television. Ditto for phones, except for replacement screens, every kitchen appliance made in the past decade and too many mass-market computers. If it breaks, you might as well buy a new one, because repairs cost just as much. When did we get this wasteful?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Custom-made goods are even worse in this regard.
PPS - Unless they've been designed with common components.

Friday Flash Fiction - A Pinch of Time

The old man tends his garden carefully, because it is literally his life. The memory-bulbs grow under the surface in the corner by the fence, his strength tree in the middle, mood flowers over there near the gate, and close to the house he keeps the time herbs. They won't grow indefinitely. That's the nature of these mystic plants, but whenever he can get a new cutting to take root, he knows he will live longer. Today he is transplanting thorned rose bushes, grown for his teeth and eyesight, to a sunnier place, where the beans used to grow. Some days he misses those beans, and the hair on his head, but it is only cosmetic. He will survive as long as he can grow more thyme. He carefully uproots the roses and moves them to the freshly dug holes, packing rich, dark earth around their bases, not too tightly, and pruning the branches with love, but no misplaced mercy.

During the replanting, a thorn pierces his skin, and the wound seeps a little blood. The tree, too, oozes sap from a branch in sympathy, and he sighs a weary sigh. He is getting too old for this. The sun saps his energy in a way it never used to do, and he has less time in his garden these days than he could stand when he was younger. Of course, in those days, he pretty much left the garden to take care of itself. Such is the limited foresight of youth. He must go in and rest for the evening, but the day has been well spent, and because of his roses, he can still read and enjoy a good steak for dinner. But as he goes to sleep for the night, he will fail to hear the rabbit digging under the fence and nibbling away at fresh thyme.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Took me a while to find this one.
PPS - I wanted something just a bit different this week.

3D technology for privacy

Using 3D technology for computer screen privacy. It might be possible to use 3D-like polarising filters with a computer monitor to keep anyone else from seeing the same thing as you on the screen. As long as the monitor is capable of displaying two different images at different polarisations, and you have glasses that can filter for only one polarisation, you could display the private stuff polarised to match the glasses and display random noise pixels polarised the other way. Anyone looking over your shoulder would see only randomness, but you with your polarised filter would see the real image. That is if you can withstand the pounding headache.

Given the generally poor state of 3D, this might not work perfectly, but it should be a little more comfortable and less conspicuous than a giant hood, and more effective than an angle restricting filter. And you wouldn't have to use it for the whole screen all the time, just for sensitive things like password fields, email or chat windows - things you'd rather not have anyone read over your shoulder.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This also assumes that nobody else has their own privacy glasses.
PPS - That's probably the biggest security hole.

Tilted touch screen desks

I think, if we're going to make desktop-sized touch screens, they should be tilted up towards us at about a 30-degree angle, like an architect's desk or drafting table. A flat desk is just not the way to work with a huge touch screen, nor is a wall panel comfortable to sit at for a whole day. But those tilted desks are just what we should have. Maybe we need flat shelves at the top or bottom to hold things so they don't roll off, but the main point here is that the touch screen itself needs to be tilted. Horizontal and vertical are not the only options, which seems to have escaped the creators of BendDesk, X-Desk and other big touch screens.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Microsoft's DigiDesk concept is close.
PPS - The demo video is all about the software, though.

Google Chrome and PDFs

Google Chrome now loads PDF files natively and much faster than Adobe Reader. So wouldn't it be worthwhile to switch the default file association to for PDFs Chrome and uninstall Adobe Reader forever? Seriously, how many weekly updates are necessary to keep loading PDFs in the slowest possible manner? How much has Adobe Reader changed for you in the past decade, and how much has it improved in speed and efficiency?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For me, the answer is "none".
PPS - To both questions.

Inception plus Facebook equals sleep socialising

If we had those dream-sharing machines from Inception, and they could operate over the internet to connect with, for instance, our Facebook friends, then we could get days of socialising done while we sleep. It would be like going to a party where the food is infinite and non-fattening, the booze is free and the consequences of your actions are only as permanent as a video game. The problems of sharing your subconscious with your friends, however, are too many to list.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also, sleeping with a needle in your arm every night might not appeal to people.
PPS - I would assume it actually works with some kind of head gear.

Kindle vs textbooks

Until electronic documents are as easy to mark up, modify, combine and carry as paper, it's likely the Kindle will not make great inroads into universities. That's a shame, because carrying one slim device would be far less cumbersome and painful than a pile of textbooks. It would seem like a major selling point.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's also hard to flip through the pages quickly to search for something.
PPS - Which I suppose you should do via keyword search if you can.

Friday Flash Fiction - High Stakes

Eight elite poker players gathered together from all over the country tonight, by anonymous invitation, for the highest-stakes game of their lives. With the prize pool taken from a ten million dollar buy-in (each), who could resist? There was Chip Trehorn, chewing on a toothpick and hiding his twitchy eye tell under a Stetson hat, Black Jack with the scarred cheek, the twins, Rocky and Rolo, and Lady Cooper, who was not really named Cooper nor, by all accounts, was she much of a Lady either.

The stacks of chips grew and shrank for hours among the evenly-matched players. Nobody looked set to pull ahead until the Ginger Ninja, in his bright orange hood, bluffed on a pair of sevens and lost it all. Slowly, the players were knocked out one by one, and by the time the sun rose on that dim, smoky club, Lady Cooper had emerged victorious, to the reluctant congratulations of her fellow players. It was only then that they discovered the club's mysterious owner was nowhere to be found, and neither was their collective eighty million dollars of buy-in cash.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Please let me know what you think.
PPS - Part of the reason I'm doing this is for feedback.

In charge of entertainment

Who is really in charge of the entertainment industry? There are those with limited scope veto power, there are the writers and actors, directors and editors, publishers and distributors, then us, the audience and customers. If all of any group left, it would come undone, but the industry can survive the loss of any one person.

In a way, every song, book, TV show or movie happens not because one person wanted it, but because no one group involved didn't want it to happen. There weren't any writer strikes, the director didn't quit over creative differences, the actors didn't walk out in a huff and the crew didn't down tools for more money. Because all of those things didn't happen, a completed product comes out the other end of the pipeline.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There does have to be some actual work, too.
PPS - Or else things that don't happen would result in spontaneous entertainment everywhere.

Gaming services vs piracy

Gaming as a service (eg OnLive, aka "cloud gaming", aka "gaming on demand") is probably the only way big budget games will be produced in the next generation of consoles and desktops. You subscribe to a service for a flat fee and get access to their whole library of games, but you play over the network - it's like a highly interactive video stream. It's the only way you can truly prevent piracy in the sense of copied games, and it works because they're interactive. Capturing the video and sound that comes down the wire only gets you a demo video, not a game you can give to your friends.

While I think it's good that there's a business model out there for games in a post-copying era, it will also shape the direction our technology takes from then on, and will mean that you can never play games without a network connection again. You can't even deal with a slow connection, because it has to be big enough to support twitch-fast video and audio. So I'm a little conflicted about this, and I cringe to think of where it might end up, but I don't think I can stop it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I just hope there won't be too many competing services with exclusive games.
PPS - But I don't want one provider in a monopoly, either.

Touch keyboards versus QWERTY

It's good that people are trying to rethink they keyboard for a touch-screen age, because it's not really an interaction method that carries over very well from the typewriter age to touch screens, big or small. We have Swype that works via continuous touch, BlindType that anticipates where you imagine the keyboard to be and some more unusual designs like 8pen, a radial touch pad with circular gestures for each letter. Nobody has the answer just yet, though. I wonder what we'll eventually settle on. Whatever it is, I'm fairly sure it won't be a QWERTY keyboard forever.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And it will probably work pretty well without looking.
PPS - Google liked BlindType so much, they bought it for Android.

Family data sharing

I'm very interested in family data sharing and backup. For instance, how do you share your family photos between houses? I'm sure there are some photos among your family of which specific people want copies, and that can easily be seen as a kind of backup, too. The problem is how you do so when Uncle Frank doesn't have a computer and Aunt Betty lives three hours away and only has a very limited internet connection? It's all well and good to point people at an internet file sync service like Dropbox or Live Mesh, but sometimes it's not an option. So what do you do?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If Uncle Frank has no computer, it's probably going to be more difficult.
PPS - But what about a digital photo frame and a big flash drive as a present?

Getting rich at the expense of others

"The love of money is a root for all kinds of evil" - Jesus.
"I wanna be a billionaire, so frickin' bad" - Travie Mccoy.

See a problem? It's not just that, though. Getting rich, quickly or slowly, is a zero sum game. That is, if you get richer, someone else has, as a direct result, become poorer. So part of what you're saying if you want to be richer is that you want everyone else to be poorer. Any way you look at it, that's just mean.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wish I could link to "Chase The Dollar" by Gerald here.
PPS - Both because it would help make my point, and because I like the song.

Sticky note programs

There are lots of programs that simulate sticky notes for your computer. Windows 7 even comes with one built in. And I've just figured out why I don't like them: you only ever get as much space to physically arrange them as you have on your computer desktop. It's as if someone gave you free reign to write whatever you want on an infinite stack of index cards, and arrange them however you want, but only within a tiny little tray. As soon as you try to store any decent amount of information there, you'll run into problems.

Scrolling and zooming are hardly new concepts in software, but apparently these sticky note programs haven't caught up to that point yet.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm sure I'd lose track of some of my notes on an infinite canvas.
PPS - So maybe it's not the final answer.

Friday Flash Fiction - Life Sentence

They sentenced Jeremiah Livingstone-Tannin to three hundred years in prison for three brutal murders. It stayed on the books, though the Old West rose and fell, and Jeremiah kept on ticking away in prison, serving his time. Occasionally a warden or a guard would catch a glimpse of him smiling that too-white smile with the teeth a little sharper than you'd think would be possible. But they shook their heads as if waking from a dream and the image was gone.

He was a model prisoner, and never in fights, neither starting nor finishing them. Nobody ever seemed to ask why he didn't age, or didn't eat at mealtimes. And three hundred years after his incarceration, to the very day, the warden released Jeremiah Livingstone-Tannin, though for some reason he insisted they let him out at midnight. Just as he was walking out of view, the guard would later swear, Jeremiah spread that old dark cloak of his, and took off like a bat in the night.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've (already) grown tired of Friday Photo. I think this idea is more my style.
PPS - Besides, everyone takes photos.

Email and collaboration

When you really think about it, email sucks as a collaboration tool. Either you need to keep copying everyone on every message so they know what's going on, even if you're just passing on a message, because some people might not know that someone else has been informed of something. Maintaining that list of who needs to know what (and who needs to know who knows what) is a major hassle.

That's even before you get to the point of editing documents as a group, where multiple people can be emailing multiple versions of multiple documents so often that it's not even clear what the most recent versions are, let alone whose job it is to merge them into one.

There are solutions, but they tend to be online (where businesses don't trust the data storage) or don't mesh with Microsoft Office. So we stick with that one old tool, email, that doesn't quite get the job done, but manages to do most of what we need.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The core problem is solved.
PPS - It's the migration and market share that we need now.

Simulation games for university training

How much can simulation games help with university training? For instance, designing and operating a mine could be simulated and, as long as the game doesn't do too many of the calculations itself, it could be a very helpful learning experience for budding mining engineers. Given that same software, though, real mining engineers could probably benefit too. You'd just have to swap out the gaming aspects and some of the simulation for real-world measurement.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For all I know, not being a mining engineer, they do this already.
PPS - I also haven't been to university lately.

Arguments and assumptions

Everything stands up to its own logic. It's the assumptions you have to question. I prefer to argue by challenging your assumptions. It's like that old saying, whoever defines the terms, wins the debate. The best way (often the only way) to counter-argue is to question the definitions, not the arguments built on them. The definitions, properly or maliciously crafted, will have the wrong assumptions behind them, and you need to point that out if you're going to argue with any hope of success.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I do enjoy a good debate.
PPS - But I never got into the formal kind.

Taking over the world

How would you take over the world with infinite cash but only one year? Most of us have all the time in the world, but not enough money to, say, hollow out a volcano or take the moon hostage. But what if those limits were reversed? You'd have all the cash you could imagine, but a time limit of 365 days. So what would you do if, one year from today, you wanted to be remembered forever as the ultimate ruler of the world?

Personally, I'd probably start with something boring like buying up all the biggest corporations and paying off everyone's mortgages. Then I'd be not only in charge of the biggest, most powerful companies in the world, but every home owner would be on my side too.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then I'd start on the assassinations.
PPS - Soon enough I'd be the only one willing to run any country.

Standard device chargers

I would appreciate one standard device charger when travelling. Right now I have one each per phone (for Debbie and me), one for the camera, one for the laptop and one for the iPod. I realise they're a bit different, but surely that's not the best we can do. They all take up so much space and get tangled together so easily that it seems like more trouble than it should be.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've seen DC converters with multiple attachments and settings.
PPS - That's not quite what I want, but it's a start.

Conflicting demands

It's difficult to have your management goals met if you issue conflicting demands to your employees. For instance, if you demand that software documentation be kept up to date at all times, but also say that writing documentation is non-chargeable time and that all employees should maximise their chargeable time, then you will have a conflict where you are actually telling employees not to do documentation. That's just an example. It is not currently happening to me.

The point is, at a high level, you might not seem to have any contradictions in your goals, but when you break them down to their real meanings for day to day work, you might find them working against each other.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And then one is going to dominate the others.
PPS - It might not be the one you want.

Supply, demand and digital distribution

When digital copies are abundant and selling like mad, should the price be lower or higher? I think that's probably looking at the problem backwards. A lower price drives demand, and because the supply never runs out, you don't have an incentive as the supplier to raise prices in order to maximise your profit. The lower the price, the more people will buy your movie, book or music and vice versa. Already music and book downloads are settling into a $1-per-unit price model, simply because that's where the maximum demand and profit lies. Movies and TV shows will probably get there too. It's just a matter of time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I look forward to those times.
PPS - Then they just need to get rid of the DRM and I'll actually start buying things.

Ticket scalping vs buying for gifts

Ticket vendors need to try and protect against scalping just as a part of their business. The problem is that ticket scalping and buying as a gift are identical transactions from an information point of view. Defending against one by necessity prevents the other. That is, if I'm buying two tickets for two friends, that looks exactly the same to a ticket vendor as if I were buying two tickets to sell to the highest bidder.

You might say I can include the names of the intended recipients at the time of purchase, but what if I'm buying ten tickets together in good faith that I have ten friends to bring with me, but I don't know which ones they will be yet? You can't just ask me to provide the names later, because that would enable me to scalp the tickets to strangers and provide their names. And what if I meet a brand new person after buying the ticket, and decide to bring them along? Well, that looks like scalping even if you have some way of verifying friendships and family relationships up front.

There's no winning here. You either have to accept a certain amount of scalping or stop selling tickets entirely.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Clearly nobody is going to stop selling if that's their business.
PPS - At least not until it's unprofitable.

Opposing monopolies

Products that oppose monopolies are important, such as Google's Android phone operating system, alternative web browsers like Firefox and Chrome, and the Linux OS. It's never a good situation for consumers when one company holds a monopoly - actual or just practical - over platforms and distribution channels. That's why Apple and Linux are important for computer operating systems and it's why iTunes and Facebook are such problems. It's not that they are bad, as such, just that they have no external point of reference.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's the capitalist version of the contrary point of view.
PPS - Without that opposition, products and services grow stale and evil.

Friday Photo - Roma Sunset

This is a sunset at Roma, Queensland, taken some time in 2009. I had to borrow a tripod to keep the camera steady in the low light.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'll be back there for Easter this year.
PPS - And it probably won't be the last time.

Engineering and details

It is an engineer's job to go from vague description to detailed design. Better tools make the process easier, but also expand the scope of what we consider possible. So we think in terms of bigger projects, which also means we pay attention to fewer details at that level. The engineer's job is to make sure those little details you forgot all work together in a cohesive whole. Engineering will never be obsolete. It will just change thanks to better tools that alter what we think of as small details.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wonder how much detail tomorrow's engineers will have to manage.
PPS - Probably about the same, but they won't look like today's details.

Platform stability

Google's Android mobile operating system is suffering (or thriving, depending on who you ask) from a glut of customised versions. Knowing which apps will run on which phones and whether yours will behave correctly (or whether your phone company has accidentally or maliciously crippled it) is like rolling the dice. You never quite know. I think the nintendo DS is being eroded a little by the many different versions. We are also starting down a similar path with point of sale systems. Right now there are three competing systems in Australia: magnetic stripe, chip-and-pin, and RFID. It's not so much a problem for consumers yet, but I can imagine businesses being annoyed at the competing systems and the constant upgrade treadmill.

Platform stability is important for consumers. You want to know that what you buy today will be supported tomorrow, and that it's not a waste of time and money to invest in it. We have Betamax anxiety about every new consumer technology, especially when backwards compatibility is seen as a stifling restriction on progress.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Blu-Ray is still suffering from this.
PPS - Despite winning out against HD-DVD.

Timeline computing

Imagine your icons - your images and videos, but also your browser history and past versions of files - all arrayed on a timeline, oldest to the left, newest to the right. Finding what you were working on last Friday is a matter of scrolling back. Restoring previous versions of files just means scrolling back to where they were last changed. To remind yourself of something in the future, scroll forward and place a note there.

I don't doubt there would be some issues to work out, like finding a file if you don't remember when you last used it, or expiring old backups and managing hard drive space, but could you see yourself using a computer interface that was built around a timeline? It wouldn't have to be the only way, of course.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There are a lot of ways computers could work better for us.
PPS - The main user interface usually only creeps forward in tiny increments.

Simple amateur video editing

There are certain photo correction tools that should be available for video too, like 90-degree rotation, colour correction, cropping and face recognition. For the most part, the only difference between working with video and still photos is the time element. A video is a long sequence of still frames that can each be processed or corrected in turn. For some tools, like cropping and colour correction, you might need to be careful to apply the effect to only one scene at a time, which does complicate things a lot. Still, I think it's about time some of the simple photo correction tools made their way into amateur video editing tools too, like Google Picasa (which can already rotate video).

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd be surprised if Google were not trying to do that.
PPS - I'd also expect it to take some time to do right.

Constant save

Ideally, our computers should use a system where you never need to remember to save your work at all, it just happens automatically all the time. That's how we work in the real world - you never need to "save" what you've written on paper. Creating it and keeping it are the same thing. Of course, that requires software to be written specifically for that arrangement, but then it starts feeling a lot more like something based on reality, built for you, rather than based on engineering constraints and built to suit the hardware.

If you also have a version-controlling file system with automatic remote redundancy, you'll have a very complete history of everything you've done, and backups are practically subconscious. No data will ever be lost simply because you saved over it, accidentally deleted it or even because of ordinary hardware failure.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I use Dropbox and Windows Live Mesh to get some of this behaviour.
PPS - But I'm talking about designing Windows around the idea.

Friday Photo - Port Arthur

This picture was taken at a historical jail site in Port Arthur, Tasmania. It was a few years ago now, so I don't remember specifically what that building is. It might be a chapel.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - But I think the chapel or church was bigger.
PPS - Only a few of the buildings still had roofs.

Mythbusters making myths

I can imagine Mythbusters inspiring a few myths and conspiracy theories of their own, entirely by accident. Mostly it would be of the form "that's just what they want you to think" when testing ways to beat the law. For instance, here are some of the conclusions they've drawn that might inspire this reaction:

- You can't beat the lie detector.
- You can't beat the breathalyser.
- You can't beat speed cameras, either with non-obvious plate blockers or with speed.
- You can't beat the bloodhound.
- You can't outsmart the drug dogs.

You just know there are people out there wilfully disbelieving those things.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also, you aren't being implanted with mind-control chips when you donate blood.
PPS - At least that's what they told me.

The contrary point of view

Every king needs a fool to mock him. Every trial needs a devil's advocate. The contrary point of view must not be silenced, because by that process we utterly lose our perspective. Anywhere an assertion is made - science, politics, religion, film-making, book editing - there should be someone whose job it is to be the "no" man.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Plus I think it would be cool to see court jesters following CEOs around.
PPS - Who wouldn't like to see that?

Mental and physical games

I want there to be a game that is as much a mental challenge as physical, but not forced like chess boxing or only mental for the coach like gridiron. I want a game where you as a player will only succeed if you are mentally and physically fit and can use both of those skills at once. Maybe what I'm thinking of is some kind of obstacle course maze.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Maybe it's unnecessary.
PPS - Because there are enough games to challenge either mind or body.

Culture and skills

Culture breeds expertise and skills. If you have a culture of valuing problem-finding and solving, then you will grow a skill set in your people of finding and fixing problems. If you have a culture of security and safety, you will encourage your people to develop skills related to keeping things secure and safe. If you have a culture of blame and surveillance, however, you will only encourage your people to learn to shift blame and avoid surveillance or rat out their co-workers for personal glory. Before long, you'd find your organisation feeding on itself so that some bits look successful at the expense of others. Soon after that, you need constant new hires (AKA "meat for the grinder") or you'll collapse and die.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's not good to be one of those corporations.
PPS - My employer is not like that.

Google, truth and knowledge

We have gathered the information of the world. It is indexed, it is accessible and easily referenced. But it is missing something. Google is the world's best, biggest and fastest card catalogue, but the information still needs processing. What does it mean and what parts are true? Wolfram Alpha is a different story, but is still quite limited.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We still need experts.
PPS - And ways to find them.

Good programs and good programmers

You're never going to get good programs from non-programmers, regardless of the tools, just like you can't get good dentistry from non-dentists or good flying from non-pilots. As soon as you're getting good programs from someone, by definition, they are a programmer. But the tools are always advancing, so the things we do and call "programming" today are the automated tasks of programmers' tools tomorrow. And, at least in theory, the tools should advance and branch out so that more people can do tomorrow what only programmers can do today.

In contrast with "good programs equals programmer", if you only ever get bad programs from someone, are they therefore not a programmer, even if they've been hired and trained as one?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There's a Venn diagram in there somewhere.
PPS - But it might not be worth the effort.

Friday Photo - Pokolbin

This is the view from a winery called Tuscany Wine Estate Resort in Pokolbin, New South Wales. As a photo, I'm moderately happy with it. The colour looks a little washed out, and the muddy grass with the drain could use some Photoshop expertise.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It doesn't do the real view any justice.
PPS - Few photos do, though.