something to work towards..

it’s been a *long* times since i’ve gone dancing! particularly given that i was going once a week for a while. in fact, i woke up this morning and had a hard time walking since i’ve been sitting for so many weeks. but i have a new goal. enough of my shit needs to be done so that i can go to the upcoming synthetic sadhus party.
why? raja ram. very simple. woah amazing. i’m super psyched to hear that it’s going to be at a venue that has an outdoor space, although i don’t know about this all-ages thing… i’ve gotten very particular lately… i can’t stand to see all of the kids in such bad wrecked stages. i end up feeling like a mother!

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SecureId: a working demo

so, i’ve spent the last 1.5 weeks slaving away at building a working demo of SecureId. it feels like i’m back at Brown – 6000 lines of code in under two weeks. damn. poorly commented, utterly hacked and in need of a desperate cleanup, but it’s the best i could do with such little time.
but i have to admit that i’m kinda proud of myself… who would’ve thought that i could put all of that together so darn fast? wow.
unfortunately, i also have to move on to a million different things asap. eek. so much to do, so little time. i’m so angry with myself for letting everything slip. ::sigh::

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oh what fun!

i remember long hours of sitting by the campfire telling mental puzzles…. my favorite:
a man is driving down a road. something on the radio startles him. he drives off the road and kills himself. what happened? (a slight version of #16)

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semi-colons are not acceptable

Ok… one should not think in semi-colons or Iterators, case statements or if/else clauses. Those should be reserved for .java files only, not mental processes or verbal communication. I did a demo. At the end of each statement/sentences, i found myself with a mental picture of a semi-colon. When i couldn’t continue, i couldn’t find the semi-colon and i would have to race through my “non-compiling” brain to figure out where the damn thing had gone. There were parentheses and too many were unmatched reaking major havoc on my mental state. I have been coding way too much lately.

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privacy continues to be problematic

Every day, i’m reminded that privacy is becoming less and less a part of my reality. What’s sad to me is not that i lack ultimate privacy, but that i’m quickly losing the privacy that i’ve gained through modern life, back to a state that is so invasive that we might as well have zero freedom. Below are random articles on privacy that i want to keep track of, because they are a reminder.

inQtel – the CIA’s VC firm.. They are paying off different startups to turn around and make spyware of sorts…

Rosen’s article on privacy (which is quite similar to the talk that i went to this week on the same topic). It’s quite nice to hear that someone is coherent about these issues, even if they make me paranoid.

[cypherpunk login for nytimes: c1ph3rpunk/c1ph3rpunk]

Nothing to Yahoo Over New E-Rules – lack of privacy on Yahoo, again.

Online Companies Draw Fire For Removing ‘Offensive’ Postings – Yahoo deleting “terrorist” messages. Too bad that all of my V-Day posts got removed too. But, i guess we are a terrorist organization, because we fund folks like RAWA and talk about pornographic words.

FDA doesn’t regulate implantable chips. Yes, they regulate everything else that goes in my body based on their moral high ground, but not chips.

Continue reading →

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good conversations & drug propoganda

what a gorgeous day – although it seems as though the bugs have emerged as well.. i sat in the courtyard today discussing lab politics with one of my oldest friends here and it’s sooo depressing to learn how much the lab consistently screws people over. yuck yuck and yuck. this was particularly painful because i spent the earlier part of the day mentally remembering why there is no way in hell that i want to be here in the future. i watched as my advisor told others how their project would look and that just made me feel gross gross and gross. this is really just not the way that research is supposed to work. ::sigh:: so i just felt disgusting coming out of that conversation in every way possible.

i keep having those mental conversations about the value of education, the power plays that happen here, etc. interesting mental games…

regardless, i also got to think about the institution of marriage, how to reform it and the politics of drugs… she gave me the most fantabulous link about how colombia’s super bowl handled anti-drug advertisements – sooo hysterical!

this is so entertaining in light of The Onion‘s latest drug-related article.

::sigh:: i have to admit that i’m quite cranky with the gov’t & drug issues these days… just like i’m always thrilled when the government is hypocritical. Drugs & the Internet is one of their latest publications, intended to crack down on online available drug information. my favorite is how they are upset that reformers are gathering online to “promote” drugs (what about when we are engaging in freedom of speech to question the government’s legitimation of alcohol/tobacco but not marijuana, a far less harmful drug [1][2][3]). and, even on the front page, they are concerned about the availability of information on harmful effects of MDMA, GHB and LSD. since when is it a bad thing to release the causes for concern? oh, right, because the people saying the problems are generally against government dictation of how to treat one’s body… plus, the gov’t is generally after raving folks, because of the promotion of mind-expansion with drugs. i think it’s a bit terrifying to realize that even my digital discontent (this page) with this approach could put me at risk. freedom of speech has failed; we are living in China, just no one knows it.

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good tech articles of the day

Nelson was right-on with his thoughts of using images as passwords – it seems as though Microsoft thoughts of that. People have much better visual memories that verbal ones…

It scares me to realize the approach that our government is going in copyright protection. I think that we’ve lost a sense of the purpose of copyright. The idea is to get more information to the common good in a way that protects the creators of the ideas. Alas, we are now seeing bills like the SSSCA/CBDTA. Of course the tech-industry is up in arms – this is against everything that we stand for, and it’s just not reasonable for the common technologies.. talk about a way to make all but the monopolies have no chance…

And remember all of my worries about consumer agents being automated, meaning that you could prioritize your customers in scary ways. It seems as though more and more companies are using bots to replace customer service folks. And i thought Sprint’s Claire was annoying… Shit… How can you make a bot realize that what you need is important or doesn’t fit into the previous protocol? How will i be treated as a young person without enough credit?

And isn’t it funny that the government can order websites to delete data, but consumers and general people can’t? I really hope that archive.org works here…

Oh.. and it’s really funny to think about artificial societies– how do you grow them and what can they tell us about the future? I think that my problem is that i want to have my own society, my own rules, my own system.. i keep thinking that i should start my own country.. i wonder if i would be a bad dictator…. i still believe that the best countries are run by benevolent dictators..

They just announced that CNN Student News will remain commercial free – thank goodness!! To me, this situation is a *big* sign that capitalism has reached a point of being absolutely ridiculous. I mean, isn’t it a bad sign that everyone needs corporate sponsorship in order to be functional in this society? Corporate sponsorship means corporate control which means limited control. If a site is supposed to be educational, supposed to teach students (which means is supposed to give multiple perspectives, not just the ones desired by that corporation), isn’t it dangerous to imagine corporate sponsorship? It reminds me of the battles that Ms. went through when they were battling whether or not to have advertisements. They couldn’t get food-related ads because they wouldn’t put recipes in their magazine; they were denied makeup-related ads because some of the images on their cover had women without makeup on!! If educational material was all corporate-sponsorship, would students not be able to hear conflicting perspectives? Would they not hear about oil spills because Exxon was a sponsor? Eek!

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aweful automated decisions

What a dumb policy. I tried to order an American Airline / Citigroup credit card today to start earning miles on American Airlines instead of USAirways (mostly because i’ve grown cranky with USAir’s service lately). Of course, i was already feeling guilty about getting a credit card with miles, because of Zittrain, but still.. i know the reality and i know that i travel and fuck, i hate it when i’m willing to give up my privacy for rewards. So, i was feeling guilty, but i called anyhow. And i went through the process and they sent me this letter in the mail stating that they are sorry that they’re unable to process my request because they couldn’t confirm my home telephone number. So, i politely call them up and explain that i am a frequent traveling and don’t have a home telephone number. And they tell me that they can’t offer me a credit card. And i got very confused, saying that i couldn’t imagine that i am the only one without a home telephone number, that i was a frequent traveler and maintained only a cell phone number. And they told me that they couldn’t confirm my identity and that it was their policy to deny credit to anyone that they couldn’t confirm by way of a home telephone number.

It was like talking to a machine – i couldn’t get anywhere with them because they had orders that they were told to follow and no matter who i talked to, they only relayed the script that they were given. Human computers. Fabulous. Let me tell you how much i love this new society. So, alas, i got frustrated and hung up, proceeded to immediately call American Airlines who was outraged and said they’d work on it.

When nothing had happened in quite a few days, i decided to call American back. This time, i got someone on the phone who told me that there was nothing that American could do because they were a separate company and that they couldn’t dictate the rules. Another human-computer reciting lines and not really being a customer service person. Great.

Once again, annoyed, i decided to call up my current Citibank credit card number, explained who i was, went through a few changes on my account and then said, oh, by the way, can i change this account to a Frequent Flyer account and !bam! sure enough, i received the change. ::sigh:: I hate dealing with stuff like this – jumping through hoops just to jump through hoops. It’s just downright irritating.

And besides, it just can’t be a good thing that society is turning away from human services to human computers. If there was any question about how aggressive powerful individuals would maintain power…

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