www.James-Strocel.com

This week I’ll be in Nelson BC for a little R&R. I’ll try to keep the updates coming, but until then here’s a great essay on the responsibility of corporations to shareholders from Crooked Timber via BoingBoing.

Working in computers almost requiresyou to be paranoid for a living. We spend so much time trying to get at all kinds data that we know for a fact that someone out there is drooling at the prospect of being able to rifle through our iTunes folders. Whenever the idea of any large entity having access to our “data” whether it’s facebook, comcast, or the City of Seattle. We go on multi-minute tirades on the right to privacy and the dangers of identity theft all the while thumping a copy of “1984″ like some kind of nerd war drum.

It’s always interesting to me how we’re quick to discuss the cons of living in a post-privacy society while ignoring all of the pros. Not that I’d really want a post-privacy society. I’ve read my share of dystopian cyber-punk stories. While they were awesome, living in one would be a complete pain in the ass. The reason we should be discussing the pros of living in a world without privacy is that the advantages are what make such bad ideas reach into reality.

Take slavery, for example. It treats people like animals, sure, but free labor kept it going for so many years. Pollution is merely a side effect of accessing the energy necessary to make modern society possible. Speaking of post-privacy societies, Facism and Communism got their run because the effect they had on crime and class warfare.

The erosion of privacy in western society may be something different from the totalitarian governments of the past. Sure, anyone can see your information, but what if you could see everyone else’s? If your movements could be all tracked, they could become the perfect alibi if you are accused of a crime. If everyone just starts producing all this data, wouldn’t it hamper government efforts to spy on people by producing a lot of dummy data to sift through? You wouldn’t have to lock your doors or your car anymore, those things just won’t open or start for people who don’t have rightful access.

These advantages are what would make a “Big Brother” society possible in the 21st century. What sort of advantages can you think of?

While we’re on the subject of clichés, let’s talk about Stuff White People Like. You might have heard of it. It’s a blog dedicated to listing the likes of a curious race of people that are worried about the problems of the world, yet not actually worried enough to do anything about it. They will scramble to any type of product that will alleviate this long-standing guilt for whatever they’ve done in the past.

A recurring theme in the blog is a constant struggle to be unique from one another without actually doing the work of being unique. This is done by going to movies that may not actually be funny, plays that aren’t actually interesting, and listening to music that isn’t exactly played well. Being unique actually surpasses the need to be entertained, well-fed and most importantly having the money to be both those things.

White people certainly don’t have a monopoly on all of the foibles brought up in the “Stuff”. This is what happens when human beings put the problem of food and shelter so far behind them that we are absolutely stumped over what to do next.

Why do we have this soul-aching need to be unique? It wasn’t enough we were all given our very own genetic code to play with and it’s not enough that we get brought up in the richest and most advanced society in History. This probably has something to do with the knowledge that not too far in the past terms like “2,000 dead from starvation” wasn’t an atrocious statistic in our society and in some societies it is still par for the course. We need to be unique to calm our fears that we won’t be the next statistic in a plague, famine, or ethnic cleansing that happens by. We want to know that we’ll be missed, and that the world will be poorer from our passing. The fact that homogeneous manufacturing processes have created all this largesse doesn’t help.

The only remedy for this frantic search for the unique is that sometimes you can be unique for doing something well. Years of art criticism and University theses have gone into establishing the “revolutionary” idea that simply doing something well is bland, banal, and a threat to the future of the arts as we know them. This love of the esoteric bleeds into other creative disciplines turning out many jacks-of-all-trades but unfortunately no masters. However what is and isn’t esoteric changes from year to year, as is the rule with all fashion. In time, your turn will come up, and you too will be famous, if only for 15 minutes.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that more writing is going on today than at any point in human history. All it takes is 8 1’s and 0’s to make a byte, my 8GB flash drive contains well over 8 billion of those, multiply that by the billions of computers all over the world and combine that with fully industrialized printing processes, and you get the idea. Now with all this talking in stasis going on and if the Infinite Monkeys Typing Theorem is to be believed, we are going to be repeating ourselves a bit. I came across a few lists of internet writing clichés that I should try to avoid in the future.

For the Love of Blog Cheese from Lindsayism.com - A lot fun cliches but some of them are things the author can do nothing about, like having sycophantic commentators. Highlights include Calling Tivo/DVR “My new boyfriend.”, Participating in any blogging “meme” (”Write down the first three venereal diseases that pop into your head.”) and using the word “meme.”

Bad Lingo: Blog-Media Clichs from Gawker.com - I know, they spelled Cliché wrong, but it is full of well-worn idioms from the internet age. It is frightening and shameful that I know which Simpsons episode [adjective]-y goodness came from.

Thirteen Blog Clichés from Codinghorror.com - It’s not so much a critique of internet writing as it is critique of blog design in general.

The 100 Lamest Game-Industry Clichés from GamesRadar.com - There is no greater temptation to use a Cliché when it’s 3:00 am, you’re out of coffeee, out of time, and most importantly out of money. While it mostly rails against games reviewers, I see this kind of language pop up on blogs and makes me start to lose my faith in humanity.

As some of you regular readers may know, the regular problem with this blog is that there are not enough updates. This is the very reason I have few regular readers. I have also noticed this is a common problem on other blogs. So, inspired by a certain Seinfeld episode, I would like to propose:

The Last Blogger Standing Challenge!!!

The rules are fairly simple:

*Each contestant writes a blog post of at least 100 words once every 24 hours.

*If a contestant goes 24 hours without writing 100 words on their blog, they pay $20 and are disqualified.

*The last remaining contestant gets to keep the pot.

Basically, if 5 people buy in to this, the prize could potentially be $100. All money shall be exchanged through paypal. If you’re interested, place a comment, or e-mail me.

Since the Wordcamp last week I’ve been hard at work trying to trick out my blog for the internet at large. This involved locating and installing a lot of plug-ins. I’ve decided to save everyone else some time and post 20 of the most useful plug-ins I’ve found on the net.

Adsense-Deluxe - helps distribute google ads around my blog. It’s part of my quixotic quest to make this thing turn a profit.

Akismet - It’s no surprise this plug-in becomes bundled with wordpress now. If it weren’t for this one the comments section would be drowning in cialis ads.

All in One SEO pack - allows you to give your posts relevant search engine terms so google will pick it up.

Brian’s Threaded Comments - allows users to reply directly to other users’ posts.

Digg This - If anyone ever decides to submit one of my posts to the social news site Digg.com (hint, hint) this plug-in will alert my blog and stick a Digg button up at the top there.

Extended Comment Options - Another weapon in the war on comment spam. This plug-in allows you to control comment access over all of your posts.

Feedburner Feedsmith - If you want to switch over to using Feedburner, this is the plug-in to get. It forwards subscribers of your old RSS feed to your new and shiny Feedburner RSS feed.

Google Analytics for Wordpress - It’s kind of tough to use Google Analytics on Wordpress because all the pages are dynamically generated. This plug-in puts the Analytics code on all the necessary parts of your page.

Google XML Sitemaps - Google keeps track of websites using XML sitemaps. With this plug-in, you can generate a Sitemap and regenerate it when your page updates, making it more visible to Google.

Livejournal Crossposter - If you have friends on livejournal, then this plug-in will scrape your post and put it on your livejournal account.

PHPlist - Integrates with the PHPlist application to create a mailing list for your blog.

Show Top Commentators - Gives bragging writes to the users who comment the most on your blog.

Simple Tags - While not quite as simple as the name suggests, it allows you to mass edit the tags on your posts.

Socialize - This will allow you to try out the Digg This plug-in. At the bottom of the post there are a number of buttons so that anyone can submit an article to Digg, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us, or any other social news site.

Subscribe to Comments - Users can catch up on responses to their posts with this handy plug-in.

Twitter Tools - Using this, you can put new post notifications on Twitter or write Twitter posts from wordpress.

Twitter Widget - Puts that twitter feed right on the sidebar.

Widgetize Anything - Not every Wordpress plug-in is optimized for sidebar widgets. This plug-in hopes to change that.

Wordpress.com Stats - Puts usage statistics on the dashboard of your blog.

Wordpress Database Backup - Nothing protects you from catastrophic failure like the occasional database backup. This plug-in does it quickly and easily.

Looking at this computer setup, I can’t tell if I should be impressed or frightened for the person who built it. The Link goes to more pictures. What do you think?

Link

In case you were counting, this is my 100th post.

The trailer for Watchmen just came out. All I have to say is: Holy Crap.

I loved the comic, and the movie looks like it wants to reproduce the immersiveness of the comic’s alternate 1980’s. I don’t care what anyone says, I’m catching this one in the theaters.

That being said, there is no way there can be a good GI Joe live action movie, but I’ll get to that in another post.

Sara and I finally used our Famous Players gift certificates to catch “Wall-E” just now, but with all the pandemonium surrounding “Batman: The Dark Knight” we probably could have snuck in for free. The film was, in a word, wonderful. Sure, the robots were cute, but the force of the ideas in that movie was something you would expect to find in a classic hard science fiction novel rather than a Disney blockbuster.

When the movie came out everyone wondered whether the conservative hate machine was going to go on a rampage the way they did with “Happy Feet”. There were those who passed off the film as leftist propaganda. But strangely, Wall-E started to become a hit among other conservative bloggers who were won over by the little guy’s crusade against a large oppressive organization and (even stranger) his love of showtunes. In fact, some left wing bloggers decided that they were really clever and decided to bash the film for the plastic merchandise that it generates or its linkage of obesity with environmental problems.

The director, Andrew Stanton, did a lovely job of sidestepping the issue in an interview with New York Magazine.

“I knew that I was going into territory that was basically the same stuff, but I don’t have a political bent or ecological message to push. I don’t mind that it supports that kind of view — it’s certainly a good-citizen kind of way to be — but everything I wanted to do was based on the film’s love story, the last robot on Earth, the sentence that we first came up with in 1994. I said, ‘I have to get everybody off the planet, and do it in a way that audiences get it without any dialogue.’ So trash did that. You look at it, you just get it. It’s a dump, you’ve gotta move it — even a little kid understands that.”

Classy stuff, but he’s not fooling anyone. Nor should he have to.

In British Columbia we’re a little more cognizant of the climate change issue than say, a place like Arizona. We have swathes of dead trees where the Winter has failed to kill off the pine beetle. The glaciers we like to ski on so much are shrinking. Stanley Park looked like a war zone after the wind storms of 2006. From our perspective, the time for being classy about the environment has passed. It’s not a controversy, it’s a real problem.

Yesterday Al Gore threw down a challenge for the United States to get off Carbon Fuels within 10 years. Sure, it seems like it’s on the border of daring and daft, but I would rather see the US fail at something like this than keep going on its present course. However in the comments section of every article on this issue there seems to be a league of twits pointing and laughing at Gore because he was a Democrat or his house sucks up enough juice to power Bangladesh. On the other side there’s the the “Gee-Whiz Mr. Gore, I’d love to help” articles where the commentator gleefully whips out a bunch of statistics about why it can’t be done.

I have had enough of people who would rather feed their own smug egos than do what must be done. People like the Wall-E animators make the case about why we should help the environment. People like Al Gore come up with plans on how to save it. I subscribe to their beliefs because the only constant I have lived with in my adult life is change. My life, and the life of everyone else on that planet will change over time because that’s how the whole concept of time works. In the past five years alone I’ve graduated University, worked for many companies, got another diploma and got married. Even their predictions don’t come true, it’s still not as foolhardy as pretending there is such thing as a status quo.

You can find out more about Al Gore’s Green Challenge Here: Link

I hadn’t been able to talk “shop” in over a month, so I headed on down to Wordcamp Fraser Valley 2008 at the Cascade Casino in Langley. It was basically a free conference for wordpress, the software I use to create this site. This blog is more than just what you see here. It’s a complex system of scripts that make sure my blog shows up on google, archives posts, keeps my comments free of spam, and all sorts of stuff I would otherwise have no time for.

Coming into this conference, I had no idea how popular this software was, and how many people were interested in it. About 100 people showed up to take in the speakers and the networking. Even my brother Jon was on hand to get some tips on how to manage his websites.

The evening started off with a talk about the basics from Raul from hummingbird604.com, who had recently imported his site from blogger to wordpress. The customization features of wordpress makes it by and large superior to other blogging platforms.

Next we had a talk from Gary Jones of bluefur.com discussing the pros and cons of business blogging. Basically, keeping your site updated with new content, brings customers back to your site, and gives you a chance to show off your knowledge about the your business’ industry.

Kulpreet Singh dispelled some of the hype about wordpress security issues, and gave some very helpful tips on how to locate and block hackers. Rebecca Bolwitt of Miss604.com gave a talk on how to modify your wordpress theme into any graphic configuration.

Finally there was a lecture from John Chow of Johnchow.com about evil ways to increase your site traffic. Mr. Chow was able to monetize a blog on his ramblings about internet marketing, cars and fine dining. Now his blog makes over $40,000 a month for him in advertising. It kind of gives a rambling generalist blog like this one hope for the future.

The evening was a great success overall. If there was any room for improvement, I would suggest that they make more time for networking. A 20 minute intermission is nice, but it doesn’t give you time to meet everyone when there’s about 100 people in the room. Failing that, a link exchange would be nice. I’d love to learn more about bloggers in the Fraser Valley. I’m also more inclined to comment if I can put a face to a name, so this would drive up traffic for everyone.