Aintaerjection

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Google’s Webgemony

December 3rd, 2009

You sit down in front of the computer.

You open up Google Chrome, go to Google Mail to check your e-mail. While there, you find your friends on Google Chat and they request some pictures. So you use Google Desktop to search for those pictures. When you find them, you remembered you wanted to look up that shop in the picture so you head to Google Maps and use Google Streetview to look through the neighborhood. After all that’s done, you progress to Google News to find out what’s going on in the world, Google Reader to keep up with your feeds, Google Images to find cute pictures of bunnies, Google Calendar to schedule your day, only to find out you need to call your friend in Europe so you have Google Voice connect your call…

It is virtually impossible to avoid Google in life now, its services being so pervasive and easy to use that in a few short years Google has gone from simply a search provider to an entire Internet experience provider. Google’s hegemony on the net and its ability to make money has allowed the company to grow beyond the confines of the Internet into other businesses: merchant transactions, browsers, operating systems. And in all Google’s offerings, one overarching goal unites them. Push toward a web-based world.

It is clear to see why. Google’s dominance on the web is undeniable, and every step we take toward a web-based society, with data stored on the Internet, is a step that Google is eager to pave a path for so that it can index that data, parse that data, and ultimately sell ads based on that data.

Because of this business model, Google can always be counted on to push for a more open Internet, standardized Internet, free Internet. And it would never “become evil” because it is one of the first companies to realize that community goodwill is a resource, and has spent time cultivating this resource until it has received almost a subconscious cult-following. But sooner or later, we must come to realize that what Google is pushing for, and what we are slowly training ourselves to depends on, is one fact.

Google is Internet.

No matter how benevolent the organization, how strong its ethics, there remains something fundamentally flawed to trusting all services to a single, for-profit vendor. Recently a Google SSL certificate snafu disabled secure connections to all Google services. Suddenly I was unable to chat through Google Chat. Though I had other means, such as AIM, the Web-as-Google future would not be so fortunate.

Cloud computing, the social web, and software-as-a-service are all pushes for a usage pattern that stresses the Internet more than just as a content delivery platform, but a complete computing platform, a lifestyle platform. Under such a platform, the focus would be moved away from the hardware device. The device with which you access the Internet becomes almost inconsequential as your storage has moved to the network, your software has moved to the network, and indeed, your entire identity has moved to the network. And it is this future that Google is primed for.

By relinquishing control over technology to the network, we are in essence giving up control over what makes us individuals for what makes us a community. It is not a dystopia we head toward, and Google is not the next “Evil Corp,” but at a point, we must determine for ourselves how much is ‘we’ and how much is ‘me.’

Posted in internets, philosophy, technology | No Comments »

Fun with Unicode – 1

August 18th, 2009

Ⓣⓦⓐⓢ ⓑⓡⓘⓛⓘⓖ ⓐⓝⓓ ⓣⓗⓔ ⓢⓛⓘⓣⓗⓨ ⓣⓞⓥⓔⓢ ⓓⓘⓓ ⓖⓨⓡⓔ ⓐⓝⓓ ⓖⓘⓜⓑⓞⓛ ⓘⓝ ⓣⓗⓔ ⓦⓐⓑⓔ

⒜⒧⒧ ⒨⒤⒨⒮⒴ ⒲⒠⒭⒠ ⒯⒣⒠ ⒝⒪⒭⒪⒢⒪⒱⒠⒮ ⒜⒩⒟ ⒯⒣⒠ ⒨⒪⒨⒠ ⒭⒜⒯⒣⒮ ⒪⒰⒯⒢⒭⒜⒝⒠

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Hilarious Enough

August 18th, 2009

It would appear that a recent server snafu has redirected all subdomains of pyoko.org to me. This has led to a general confusion as people who are looking for SolidSharkey, jinmen juushin, burichan (ew) are all being redirected to me.


Google Analytics showing a brilliant 709% increase in traffic

I don’t mind the extra visitors, but I feel like I am shorting them on their intended purpose of being entertained by a circle of jerks. So until we can sort this out, please don’t e-mail me asking where so-and-so went.

Posted in internets | No Comments »

New Font Ideas

July 22nd, 2009

Being inspired by Ironic Sans, I have come up with some other font ideas.

  • Times New Greek: like the Roman variant but with more pederasty.
  • Tacoma: similar to Tahoma, but will crash your computer irrecoverably if you type at a certain rhythm.
  • Sebastien: the crabbier version of Arial.
  • Millennium Gothic: impractical due to being ten times the size of Century Gothic.
  • AOL Instant Courier: unused because it always comes out as neon pink Comic Sans telling people to look at your pix.
  • Garados: evolved from Garamond at level 20. Learns Dragon Rage.
  • Onager MS: in the same class as Trebuchet MS but uses torsion-powered kerning.
  • Hallucida Sans Unicode: its got trippy code points all over, despite all of them changing and tasting like purple. Also, U+262D is a unicorn and U+2363 can kiss my ass.

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American Impossibility: Life

July 16th, 2009

It seems to me that there are great contradictions within the great traditional hero-worship of America’s Founding Fathers. With the recent hearings for the new Supreme Court Justice, debates of what said Fathers have written and what they mean have taken on renewed interest. I contend that what was set forth by the Founding Fathers is ridiculous and espouses egotism.

Key to this is the Great American belief in entitlement. Each individual, so the bicentennial wisemen state, has the right to Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness. It is also held by them that such rights are self-evident and unalienable. I hold that it is far from evident what they even mean by the three words, much less how they are evident of themselves or how they cannot be violated. I will start with Life.

Life is the center of most controversy in all of human history. Mostly with its removal. But never is it clear what Life truly is. We all feel we know what life is, but when pressed on the point, our understanding dissipates and we can only resort to analogies. Life, the Buddhists say, is like a flame. This I think is not unacceptable. Life to me is a process, much like a flame. A flame consumes resources, and outputs energy, leaving behind smoke and carbon dioxide. Life consumes resources, and outputs lethargy, leaving behind dung and carbon dioxide. Already the similarities are striking.

However, if Life is to be a process, it must be a special one because we do not harbor such concepts as “Right to Fire.” What then, is so special about Life that it must be protected at the expense of all else? Probably the difficulty in its continued existence. A fire provides the same functions as any other fire, but one life does not do the same as another. Telling a parent who has lost a child “It’s okay you can have another one” just doesn’t quite have the same effect. But given its special nature, the right to life ought to reside in the life itself. Yet the same proponents who cry the unborn deserve life refuse the right to life of one choosing death.

If there were such a thing as Right to Life, then there must also exist such a thing as Right to Death. After all, death is the natural conclusion to life. Yet somehow, individuals are granted one but not the other, probably for purposes of continued taxation. If Life were really an inalienable right, then how can Nature, State, and Man take it away at a whim? Obviously there is no such right, or if there was then it is alienable by everyone. And to entitle a living person with the right to live is a state-issued intellectual slap-in-the-face, akin to giving water the right to be wet.

Life is not a right, life is a privilege: a privilege bestowed upon the bundles of chemicals doing nasty things to each other that we call a person; one that is loaned to us to take advantage of, and if we were any bit grateful, we would pay back the debt. All that the wig and stockings sporting men of the 18th century have put forth then is an ideal, far removed from reality…

Postscript: Lack of Right to Life does not imply granting the Right to Death to everybody and anybody, Government least of all.

Posted in philosophy | No Comments »

The Silent Q

June 1st, 2009

Wow, it’s June already. What the hell, Time? What’s with the cold shoulders?

First off, as a follow up to the Sudoku Knife-fighting post, it now appears that detainees at Guantanamo Bay are being offered satellite TV and Sudoku to preserve their sanity. I say we give them all shivs and then we’ll finally have a sport worth watching.

Secondly, it has come to my attention over the years as an abuser of English, that it is sorely lacking in various aspects (e.g. facade, schadenfreude, kowtow, rodeo, you’d think English had no words of its own). But in this instance, the existence of the concatenation of certain conjugations of to be (is, are) with “not” (isn’t, aren’t), but not the first person singular conjugation thereof. And the next person to make an ain’t-aer joke will receive swift death.

In order to compensate for this linguistic oversight, I would like to introduce the concatenation “amn’t“, as that of the first person singular “am” and “not”. I would like to, but it looks dumb as all hell. To cure this terrible affliction of All-Hell-Dumb-Looking-asness, there needs to be an injection of Awesome in the form of sadly-underused but high-Scrabble-point-valued letters. Like Q.

Not only does Q get you a full 10 points in Scrabble, but it also has the best musical named after a street named after it. However, English pronunciation rules sadly neglect to specify what to do with Q lacking a following U. My solution: silent Q. Because after the business with silent Gs, Hs, and such blatant disregard for pronounceability such as crwth, I think English really doesn’t care what happens, being so distracted by how to deal with “ough” (thorough, through, tough, bought). The silent Q can be added in any number in any position, and is the bane of Spelling Bee contestants everywhere. And in this case, wonderfully appropriate for insertion into “amn’t“, creating the best contradictory contraction “amqn’t“.

I swear I amqn’t crazy.

Posted in linguistics, sudoku | No Comments »

Bums.

May 1st, 2009

Wow it’s May already. Time flies quickly when one is drowned in life.

It seems that with the warming weather, the bitter coldness of New York turns into uncomfortable, muggy rain. And whenever it rains, the bums escape into the subways, seeking shelter, spare change. It is unfortunate that they have also found out about the nice long peaceful stretch of ride between 14th and 34th Streets, and have deemed it the best time to hit riders up for cash. They are wily, those bums, for they know you cannot escape and there is naught else you can do but pay attention to them.

Not every bum is the same; there are many subspecies of Homo bummicus. Here are the categories I noticed so far:

  • Silent Slumberer – These are the most benign bums you’ll meet on the subway systems. They don’t want anything from you, they just want to catch a few winks to prepare them for a heavy night of sleeping ahead of them. The only problem they pose is that they take up lots of seats so as to recline horizontally, and usually smell like an unhealthy mix of decay and keggers.
  • Sorry Sob – The most basic of your bums, these are the ones who come in with a story prepared, usually about how they lost their job (most likely due to the economy, or a fire), home (usually from the economy, or a fire), limbs (not so frequently from the economy or fire), and hence need your change to feed their two to six hungry children.
  • Talent Tease – Instead of depending on your generosity/magnanimity, these are people who either almost have a talent, or pretend to almost have a talent that they will perform for you. This usually involves some sort of half-assed singing, dancing, or a quarter-ass of both. You usually feel embarrassed by the end and wish they would just beg normally.
  • Professor Poser – It is a well known fact that some Professors often stop feeling the need for personal hygiene and regain a form that would make their Neolithic ancestors proud. Unfortunately, this coincides with the visages of people who are financially unable to maintain their appearances. Hence, much confusion abounds. It helps not that the Professor and their Posers both like to ramble and mutter incoherently about incomprehensible things. One can only rely on what Holmesian talents one harbors or guess the true Professor from the Poser.
  • Benevolent Bumkeeper – These would be the anti-bums. They go around subway trains announcing that they have bags of food and water, looking for other bums to help. The Bumkeeper usually does this as a part of a volunteer organization which is usually not supported by public funds and guess what, they want your change too. I hypothesize that if ever a Bumkeeper and a real bum met, they would annihilate each other, releasing odors of strengths proportional to their masses.

Ah the joys of the subway…

Posted in nyc, subway | No Comments »

A Delighted Greeting

April 13th, 2009

Dear Internet, Happy Easter:

Posted in internets | No Comments »

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