December 2006 Archives

“ — I picture the flow of life as a deck of slides”, he says. “You move from one to the next, and sometimes, one of them seems to animate, and it becomes like a movie on its own, and you can see various dimensions through it. Other slide shows.”
“ — It's called interaction”, I reply.
“ — Interaction is like radio. Sometimes you're tuned in, sometimes close, sometimes not at all. When you're tuned in with someone, the signal is like perfect and clear.
— Yeah, and sometimes it's just scrambled. Signal versus noise. I'm tuning...” planting my eyes in his.
“ — Those eyes...” he says.
“ — What?
— I don't want to hurt you.”

I'm puzzled and silent for a moment, but he's been looking at me for hours with eyes and smiles that contradict my sudden doubt about the reciprocity of our feelings. If it's not what I feel it is, we're both perfect mirrors. May be I'm just going too fast.

“ — Life could be a lot simpler, if only we didn't make it so complicated”, he says.
“ — I think it's because it looks less frightening that way. It's more reassuring to seem in charge, even if it's only a simulacrum of control.
I wish the time would stop now”, I whisper.
— It has.”

At this moment, I recall this scene from Shortbus where Severine describes her best orgasm, believing that she was alone and that time had stopped, but then realized that she wasn't alone and time hadn't stopped. He'll be gone soon and I'm sad. I feel my tears and make a useless try at hiding them.

“ — Don't go sad at me.
— I'm not sad, I'm happy.
— This is intense”, he says.
“ — How often do these things happen?” I ask, knowing the answer already.
“ — Not often.
— We're on the same wavelength. Now the question is about the bandwidth.
— And the volume! Those eyes...
— I'm looking at the dimensions in this interactive slide, where they can lead us to...
— We'll see. It's a PowerPoint show.
— I'm using Keynote!”, I reply, with a grin. I didn't know architects could be so geeky.

We've been like teenagers for three days and, oh gosh... does it feel good!

On Xmas eve, a little web technology silliness^* for fun, offered by Tim Mansfield who had the idea of validating the Vatican home page (which has the wicked cool URL www.va) through a hypothetical religion validator (on the model of the W3C validator). Enjoy:

No God found! Attempting validation with Jehovah 4.01 Transitional. The God Declaration was not recognized or is missing. This probably means that the Formal Public Identifier contains a spelling error, or that the Declaration is not using correct syntax. Validation has been performed using a default “fallback” God Definition that closely resembles “Jehovah 4.01 Transitional”, but the religion will not be Valid until you have corrected this problem with the God Declaration. You should place a God declaration as the very first thing in your Jehovah religion.

You have used the doctrine named above in your religion, but the God you are using does not support that doctrine for this belief. This error is often caused by incorrect use of the “Strict” God with a religion that uses frames (e.g. you must use the “Transitional” God to get the “target” doctrine), or by using vendor proprietary extensions such as “marginheight” (this is usually fixed by using heresy to achieve the desired effect instead).
This error may also result if the belief itself is not supported in the God you are using, as an undefined belief will have no supported doctrines; in this case, see the belief-undefined error message for further information.

He also noted that the design is so last century (but hell! it's not as if they'd absorb new science that fast :p) and that no one has updated the metadata since JP II passed over.

(*) His site has been down for the past few days, I retrieved the post via his RSS feed.

An Australian man has registered a patent for a "circular transportation facilitation device" - more commonly known as the wheel. Melbourne patent lawyer John Keogh said he registered the patent to show flaws in an intellectual property law that came into effect in May, the Australian newspaper The Age reported.

[...]

"The patent office would be required to issue a patent for anything. All they're doing is putting a rubber stamp on it."

But Commissioner of Patents Vivienne Thom said: "To obtain the patent the applicant must make a declaration that they are the inventor.

"Obtaining a patent for the wheel would require a false claim, which would certainly invalidate the patent," she added.

Lawyer moves to patent wheel, by the BBC

Oh well, I guess all is in the "certainly".

[from this /. thread on Microsoft patenting RSS in Vista]

It seems that Apple plans to ship ZFS in Leopard. That's an über-geeky gift but a very good news. ZFS is an innovative and promising new filesystem created by Sun (see ZFS on Wikipedia and Sun.com).

It'll be particularly interesting if Apple starts again to ship desktop computers that can hold more than two hard drives.

Yahoo! TV recently released a new design without offering up a beta test or preview (like we did with Yahoo! Mail) and the on-line reactions have been resoundingly negative

Don't Fuck With Simple by Jeremy Zawodny, and Yahoo’s Blog Takes Its Blogging Lumps, Like a Real Blog Should by Tony Hung, both offer a terrific lesson about redesigning big web properties and managing a public corporate blog with comments open to good and bad feedback.

Second Life escapists told to wake up:

The World Development Movement (WDM) has loaded a digital counter into Linden Labs' virtual world which tallies the number of preventable child deaths since it was first opened in 2003. A child's life is lost every three seconds.

The wake-up call comes on the same day a chilling survey reveals almost half of Americans who use "virtual communities" believe events there to be just as significant as those in the real world.

The WDM's Peter Taylor said: "Millions of people are now spending more and more of their time in Second Life or similar virtual environments. We are here to remind them that they can't escape the problems of the real world."

I think it's first time I mention Second Life. I was just waiting about something worthy to post about ;-).