brentashley

Ross certainly gets it about the World of Ends. Providing services on a network is all about being an endpoint yourself, but acting as a middleman between the consumer of your service and the value they seek. Tucows isn’t so much a place IN the net that is a source of downloadable files as one ON the net that acts as a proxy whereby a seeker of files can be matched up with a producer of files – an enabler of the two-way conversation.

Since, as David Weinberger discusses, a world of ends means Spam filtering must be done at the ends, that doesn’t mean it has to be done at the terminus of the conversation – interlocutors play an essential role.

Only in town for a couple of days, Doc Searls managed to find time to come and meet with a few of us who could make it out.

Michael O’Connor Clarke was first to arrive. He had a nice adjunct to the World Of Ends discussion – I’ll let him explain it.

Tim Aiello, my partner in crime on many projects, was there.

Tara Cleveland, who when not designing is driving the research for the MACCAWS group, came along.

The Accordion Guy serenaded us with a sweet rendition of (You Shook Me) All Night Long. He also managed to rank high on the nerd compatibility scale with me reminiscing about the Rockwell AIM with its 1802 microprocessor and heat-transfer printer.

Doc arrived with two colleagues from Tucows. I talked with one of them, Ross at length about some anti-spam stuff that Tim and I have been up to. Just added his blog to my subscriptions list. The other, DarrylG, yakked with Tim at length but alas, has no blog to link to.

Interesting conversation was had, some debate. Absolutely no mention whatsoever of foreign policy, thankfully. We should do this kinda thing more often.

Tim took this picture of me with Doc.

I’m arranging to meet Doc Searls about 6pm at The Academy of Spherical Arts near King and Dufferin. Come along if you can.

I understand that there might be wireless available:

Address and map if you follow the link.

I’ll try to get up on blogchat while we’re there if anyone wants to contact us.

Simon notices that weblogs.com pings don’t seem to be working from my site. Odd, I had it clicked on in MT. I’ve clicked blo.gs as well now and trackback and all. Let’s see how it goes.

Funny that this evening I happened to be yakking with Shane McChesney for two and a half hours and then check my news to find that Scott blogged about both of us on the same day. Could be eerie coincidence, but maybe it’s the Canadian connection. Umm, eh.

Poor Tim has been grappling with the fucknuts at Network Solutions. I’d laugh, but it’s a domain I share with him.

Further to my XP trial recently, I’ve decided to ditch Microsoft altogether for my new primary workstation. I went out to my neighbourhood Staples store this weekend and bought Mandrake Linux Power Pack 9.0. Just $79.99 Canadian for 7 CDs packed with Mandrake plus all sorts of commercial and open source applications. I’ve got it up and running very smoothly indeed. There will be a couple of things I’ll have to either run on my old machine or set up to work with Wine, but I think it’s gonna be a good experience – certainly not one for the faint of heart or those lacking in nerdiness, but I’m the poster-boy for such things, so no problem here.

I finally gave XP a try on my new machine.

The bold primary colours, the fonts and pictures, the icons and widgets that look like alphabet blocks, the condescending tone of the prompts, the wizards that assume you’re an imbecile, the Teletubby landscape background, the automatic password-free signon, the invitation to hold on to the MSN rope so you don’t get lost – it’s a FUCKING KINDERGARTEN.

Yes, I know it’s essentially Win2k underneath, if you can dig through all the sugar and crap to get to it. And even then, I’d never be quite sure that some handholding automaton isn’t going to come along and readjust my environment “for my comfort and convenience” after I’ve set things up Just So.

That partition only lasted 35 minutes. Buh-bye Tinkywinky. Buh-bye Po. Good morning Windows 2000, thanks for not trying to wipe my ass for me.

The US’s War On Dissenting Opinion continues unabated on any number of fronts. There’s no sense voicing any sort of contrary position or encouraging meaningful discussion; their course was decided long ago.

Albert Delgado commented on a previous blog post by quoting Herman Goering from the Nuremberg trials:

“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”

It’s not so much that I disagree with the end result they’re looking to achieve. I’m mostly insulted by their ridiculous diplomatic sleight-of-hand meant to fabricate premises for action and draw our attention away from the real core agendas driving their actions.

Please, give me credit for understanding and supporting a long-term strategy of protecting oil resources from control by irrational interests, or of nipping a potential nuclear terrorism or cancerous fundamentalism problem in the bud before it ever has a chance to take hold. Just don’t feed me prevarication and spin.

It reminds me of all the bullshit store signs I’ve ever seen that start with “In order to serve you better”, or “For your protection and safety”. You absolutely know what follows is going to be something that reduces your choices, infringes on your rights, or costs you money. I’d rather they told me up front that they really mean “In order to reduce shoplifting”, or “To keep our insurance costs down” and allow that I might have the sense to see that that will be to my longterm benefit to go along with it.