Month: April 2001

Excerpts from ‘My Big Gay Life’ (5) So you think you’re angry with Big for the way the evening ended the other day, and you’d chucked him a very brief e-mail designed to assess the lines of communication, to which there had been no reply. So after a conversation with a friend, you decide that what you really want to do is give him a quick ring. So you do. And he hangs up on you. Which makes you think, what the hell? So you sit there for a minute being puzzled and slightly irritable, before deciding to be magnanimous. So you send a text message saying: ‘Fair enough. See you around sometime”. And then he rings up immediately. His dog is playing in the river, and he’s all cheery. What exactly does one say in this situation?

If someone said that they were going away for a week, but that they’d give you a ring once they’d got back, at what stage can one start legitimately getting slightly narked? Your answers please!

I have a quandary. In my flat, we have (to date) four rules of life. Two of these rules (1 and 4) this evening appear to be in direct opposition with one another. The situation is that I might have to go out for a drink with a friend in central London. The rules are as follows: 1) Inside Good, Outside Bad. 2) Everyone’s a **** (i) Men are particularly ****s. 3) Buffy is life. 4) Vodka is our friend. What shall I do? [You have until 9pm GMT to answer this question.]

A tesseract or hypercube is a piece of hypothetical four-dimensional geometry that is generated by dragging a cube across a fourth dimension much as that cube is generated by dragging a square across three dimentional space. There’s a fair amount on the net about them, but my favourite site (simply called Tesseract) includes a projection of the 4-d hypercube onto three dimensions. It’s not entirely clear from the simulation how or what such an entity operates. But for more about this, and other geometric/dimensional wonders, you can’t go far wrong with Flatland.

A fascinatingly political comment from the BBC on The UK Census and Big Brother: “Most appreciate that the information is vital for planning the numbers of schools, hospitals and social services. But many will feel a twinge of unease about invasion of privacy and revealing all to faceless government officials.”

On the peer-to-peer / interconnected / web of trust: This is a rough combination of ideas from epinions, dirk and napster (with a little bit of avondi in there as well).

We all know about Napster. The principle is simple for the few of you that don’t. I have MP3 files on my computer. Napster keeps a record of what I have. While I am online, other people online can search for MP3s, and download them directly from my computer if they want.

Now imagine that every citizen in a country has a program on their computer like Napster. Instead of MP3 files, they present themselves and the skills that they have, or merchandise and products that they produce or work with. That’s stage one – people can do a search for a good or service that they want, and find the individual or company that produced it directly. There is a separate box, optional, for the area in which the service is to operate. The next stage (which is one that is already semi-implemented by Napster) is the integration of instant messaging. All the people that you know on a daily basis and wish to communicate with are on your friends list. Now you integrate epinions‘ ‘Web of Trust’. You can rate your friends (or anyone else on the network) as to their provision of any service that they offer (from cabbages to web design). You can also rate them as a friend, whether they are someone that you intrinically like and / or trust. Now when someone does a search for ‘web design’ they first and foremost get a search that runs down their web of trust. People that they trust, who know people that they trust, might know of someone who they think is a great web designer. Each step removed from the originator lowers the potential trust rating of the person, while a separate geographically random – in order to limit the possibility of cultish behaviour – sampling of five hundred other people’s opinons presents an average of the general faith in the company or institution. Finally, combine this whole thing with an avondi style currency of barter exchange, and you’ve just heavily democritised the entire free-market economy along peer-to-peer lines.

Barbelith: Timothy McVeigh’s letter to Fox: “You may or may not have ethics or beliefs that match up with this man’s. Mine do not match his particularly closely. Having said that, if I believed what he did, and could express myself as clearly as he can, and honestly believed that the FBI was an affront to the freedom of America’s citizenry – well wouldn’t his actions then be justified? If he believes himself to be at war, then isn’t it appropriate to fight that war? So that’s the question – how do we tell whether someone’s ethics are acceptable? And the actions that they take? Where do we draw the line? If I see a people oppressed, is it my job to fight for them, tooth and claw, whether they be in Bosnia, or unknowingly oppressed in the US?”

Wow, that really is cool! A “Mac OS X application that takes a small metadata file, and wraps a lovely GUI around a shell script”. Jesus Christ. I need me one of them. I mean, after all, it could be extremely useful if I wrote “a command-line script and [needed] to let someone with no Unix experience run the program”. Could someone tell me please, why oh why are all my friends better at all this technical crap than me?

Thanks to Andi for helping an otherwise slow afternoon at work. And to her companion with the excessively acidic stomach – lay off the coke. If you’re not careful, you’ll burn right through…

I’m deliberating, after a depressingly awful meeting with Big last night, whether or not I should send him this e-card, while making it clear – of course – that it is a joke. Perhaps I could combine it with a ‘I’m heartily sick of this’ message. Maybe that would make it clearer. And to whoever it is that keeps finding this site by typing in my name into Google can sod right off as well. It feels really creepy.