Lun-Dun

I miss you already.

Seriously Interwebz, wtf

So on a whim I've gone and gotten myself a Pinterest account. Wtf? What's this hype with this shit? No tags, crappy search function, rest of functionality blatantly copied over from tumblr/soup, no themes and the same shit-hipster-content as everywhere else. The only incentive - invite-only access. Yeah, as if that'll stop the idiots from coming there. And the cherry on top. Account creation via linking with fb/twitter (you can unlink later) - a paranoid, sorry, privacy concerned netizens, nightmare.
Fun fact: somewhere around Feb./Mar. 2004 the Internet had 750M users, fb reached the same amount in Nov. 2011 (all of Internet at that time was about 2,2 billion). As I've written before we used to browse the net, now we just scroll it. All of the content is filtered and siphoned into a single stream of information on a single page (which in itself, as a concept is a good thing considering the amount of raw data generated every second one'd have to go through to get to the morsels). However one little consequence of this that just keeps nagging at my noggin - the G-Men don't need to do anything about de-anonymizing the net, we're doing it for them with all the apps, linked-accounts, services we've let access other services who in turn have access to yet other ones just on the premise that they won't use our data for anything else except importing contacts. Why do I cringe with doubt? Guarantees? Change of terms of service, bitches! "All your content are belong to us."What guarantees? Mark Z. was wrong, privacy isn't dead, or rather it is, but it did not die of natural causes. Our laziness just kept gnawing at it piece by piece until there was nothing left.

Outsourcing

I will write a longer piece on this when the issue is resolved - what goes on the net stays, and more importantly, can be found and read by prying eyes, and I want my stuff back, fixed and working asap. So, for the time being let me just say the following regarding a certain repair service of a certain photo equipment manufacturer in a certain country in Central/Eastern Europe - better results would be achieved by outsourcing the job to untrained monkeys suffering from Alzheimers dosed with LSD than the current staff they've got.

Ping

Twenty klicks in two hours. How low I have fallen. I'm sipping a beer, hot bath in the works, then off to Morpheus-ville. It just can't be reproduced.  If not for the birdsongs which I inexplicably associate with the sound of a working bone-drill this would be a perfect mor/vning. In other news, the art-trade with Mari is in the works (I've yet to figure out a song in return) while the concepts for W.  sadly remain, well, concepts. Now, time for some R'n'r.

Art block

Attn Dear Readers!
Drop a comment with what you want drawn, and I'll send ya an email with the result*. I gotta get over this art block somehow.

*no guarantees that ya'll like it 'though.

Musings

The weekend retreat is over. It was nice to get away from the construction site that Poznan had become. Anywhere I looked debris, detours and warning signs. Dust settling while I fall asleep to jackhammers banging 60 feet away from my windows. Unfortunately home disappointed me in one respect. I was expecting wafts of smoke from burning stubble to permeate the air, mixing with the redolence of a cold early spring night, and found none. On one hand it’s nice that they seem to have finally learned something and stopped burning everything to scorched earth. On the other, that particular smell was something I always associated with the vernal transition.
On the way I witnessed some extraordinary crepuscular rays, burning through the fog coiling through the forests and fields at daybreak. As is always the case, I hadn't brought my camera with me. Murphy's Law in its ugly flesh. Right now, coming back, on a train passing through all these small towns and villages the names of which I always forget it seems I found it in me to write a few lines. I always liked that particular sense of separation from reality while on a train. Sure, when you have to get somewhere on time, trains are usually an utter clustercoitus. However when traveling at one’s leisure, just enjoying the view out the window zooming, alright, crawling by, there's this sense that the outside rules are somehow suspended, nonexistent for the moment. That will, obviously, come back and bite me. But for now, I’m just being carried by the flow and let myself drift along with it. It’s a nice feeling and I’m surprised at myself how I’ve missed it.

Signal to noise ratio

I miss the old Internet. The one without google or facebook checking the inside of my fridge or laundry basket. Without having to worry about LSOs, targeted ads and whatnot. I miss IRC, ftp, even Geocities (okay, some parts - the horrible animated gif backgrounds one could find there coupled with looped midi music is something best forgotten). I know that some of this is still there, but that sense that there is a cornucopia of things that one can discover (to ones joy or disgust) seems gone. I miss not knowing that in order to discover said cornucopia I have to go over corporate paywalls, sign in through site A just to be routed through sites B, C, D to get to Q where I have to evade trolls while wading through a swamp of datasludge. Is attributing sources so hard? Compare articles on pl and en wikipedia for the number of attributed bibliographical sources. Seems it takes arcane knowledge of the highest degree to do it. I miss simplicity of information without clutter.
I remember this one time, ten, maybe twelve years ago when I found a ftp server stuffed with AMVs on some Italian univeristy site. The feeling was similar to rummaging through and old attic and happening upon a particularly interesting bauble, book or other thingamajig. Fat chance of that happening now. I think I'll start using an off-line email client again. Brush up my html, maybe tackle php.

Okay, enough with this rant(-ish) fit of nostalgia. My sick leave is at an end. Monday starts in 3+ hours. Time for a nice hot cup of joe and some light reading to get in the mood. "The rum diary" perhaps? On another note I need to get a haircut. I miss my mohawk.