Month: August 2006

Pretty pictures and voting

I’m sitting in the living room (the ethernet cable i have doesn’t stretch further) and Anna is watching Mr Romance. As a result, I have my headphones on and listen to Autechre at damage-inducing levels.
I just can’t stand reality-tv shit. Seriously, I can’t. It’s a thing I have where I have to walk out of the room and either smoke or cover my ears and go “na-na-na-na” until my retardation-levels have gone down sufficiently.

what can we learn from the above images? we learn this:

1) ATM machines run Windows NT and occasionaly get tired of giving us our money and say “fuck you” for no apparent reason other than hating their existence. (try being an old Windows box mounted in a hole and see how you like it)

2) Yes, it is possible to write quite random things if you didn’t plan ahead, and should you find yourself in front of a wall with a spraycan handy this might be the result. Or maybe burri-burri-burritooo?

3) Wear sunscreen, for fucks sake. this happens to be Anna, but it could be you!

4) There were three of us, and no-one knew that you should not connect two batteries serially, but rather earth one of the starter-cables. Oh well, you live and you learn. (In the meantime you are very frustrated.)

5) I happened upon a voting booth at the library and snuck in to cast my vote on the most interesting alternative. (At least on the national level. In the municipal and regional elections I voted for the least evil/sucky/assramming party). I’m voting for the Swedish Pirate Party cause they actually have a chance to get some radical changes through. Hopefully they’ll get above 4% and will be able to have the other parties eating pirate pussy to get the deciding votes.

6) Idle hands are the devils watercolour painting brushes.

(yet) Another thing to feel guilty about

It’s always fun to see documentaries that trace everyday objects back to their origins. Usually those films are about bread or maybe books; one comes from wheat, the other from the forest. We get a nice line to follow and are given the option of keeping our hunter-gatherer ancestry in sight. (well, sort of)

I’m always baffled (well, again, sort of) when it turns out that the apples I’m looking at in a store have been shipped across the globe. It just doesn’t make sense to me. And if you try to track down the components and resources of high-tech stuff, you’ve got a lifetime of tracking ahead of you.

Take the example of tantalum, a metal powder extracted from coltan ore, and a required part of cellphones, computers and airplanes. It’s a rare resource: Prices are high and the supply is low. Market forces at work here, people. And those forces are at the moment, to put it gently, bum-raping the people of Congo where there’s a huge deposit of coltan ore.

You have a bunch of rebel groups fueling their civil war by selling the ore to refineries that in turn sell this to high-tech companies (Apple? oh, Apple i though you were a cool company! This shit aint cool! Not cool, y’hear?) and in the process killing people (or enslaving them to work in mines), destroying animal habitat (killing gorillas – your cellphone is killing cute baby gorillas) and generally making a muck of things and adding some more bad to an already quite baddish world.

What to do what to do? I love the quote from Outi Mikkonen at Nokia, when asked how they check up on their suppliers if their tantalum comes from Congo: “All you can do is ask, and if they say no, we believe it.”
Yes, because we all know that Nokia just doesn’t have the resources necessary to check up on the supply chain.

I don’t know what to do, but at least I feel i should know where my stuff comes from. A good place to start on that is here: www.globalissues.org

So much misery, so much fun

This has been around on the interwubs quite a lot: America Online managed to spill three months worth of search logs from aol.com, and people were quite quick to parse the search strings for everyone’s amusement.

The fun part is that all searches are related to individual users – you can’t really tell who’s who (unless of course they use that as a search string), but individuals are linked to a user number.

There are a couple of searchable thingies that have sprung up around the aol-fappa, but by far the best one I’ve seen is this one: http://czern.homeip.net/aolsearch/.

Something Awful made quite a scary summery of some of the searches.

People often call me a sick and perverted bastard odd, cause I keep telling them about strange things I find online. Thing is, most of my friends don’t spend as much time online as I do, nor do they follow strange links to dark and murky corners of the internets. I don’t fear to plod along those paths, and I see it as a public service when I inform my friends about the things that I find there; if that happens to be dog-on-cat interracial bondage, can I really be blamed for it? I say not, and if you follow the link to Something Awful, you’ll be convinced that whatever I might dreg up, I’m not in the same league as some of these puppies..

The public image of the decomposition process

1) Walking home from Kellys the other evening, a girl asked me for a lighter. After lighting her cigarette she asked me if “anything was the matter, you look so depressed and angry.”

2) Standing behind the counter at work. A guy comes in with his daughter, and the daughter askes my co-worker miranda if I’m her dad.

3) Farting in public doesn’t seem like such a big deal anymore.

If you’re bored: improvise

One of the most popular features of the computers in the store (Macbooks & iMacs) is the built in iSight in combination with Photobooth. It’s not that the effects you get in the application are new or rad in any sense the kids might use those terms, but rather it’s the braindead sillyness akin to warped mirrors that is so alluring.

At some point I’m going to create a gallery of all the images customers (and employees) have taken of themselves; hopefully to much amusement of all involved, and with as few lawsuits as possible from ridiculed parties.