concordokken

R.I.P. Andreas Katsulas: “

Those who have known me for a long time know how big I was into Babylon 5 when it first came out; my virtual fingerprints are all still visible all over the Lurker’s Guide.

I was sad to hear that Andreas Katsulas, perhaps its best actor, certainly under-appreciated by the world at large, passed away a couple of days ago at age 59.

Cigarettes were the cause, lung cancer was the result. Score yet another win for the Tobacco Industry, and a big loss for the rest of us.

“

(Via Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog.)

I’m sitting here in my makeshift office / kitchen writing a proposal for a novella remix, the sun is shining harshly so i’d better drop outside for a few hours since it’s almost to hot to be inside during the day.
I’m thinking I should post the notes after i’m done with the novella, and doing this bottom up is much more fun, studying ruckers character driven plots has led me to realise that it’s the way to go, but it’s going to be fun squeezing in pop references into a midevil novella.

anyway, going outside, toodles to self.

(oh and, post-roman empire britain == teh win)

Currently playing in iTunes: Lag Time by Ani Difranco

So someone’s been shot by a member of the swedish national guard … again.
This is the second time during ten years that I know this has happened — disregarding that most illegal firearms in sweden are .. military firearms.

I read a transcript of a discussion regarding the shooting over on Commissary Akuts blog^
the Officer being interviewed said, with a auspicious tone, that the guardsmen are allowed to have their firearms at home since in the event of war, they’d be armed. The thing with this is that they aren’t allowed to store ammunition for said firearms in their homes.
so why do they need the firearms at home in the first place?
historical. that’s the reason, they’re allowed to have it at home since the guardsmen before the 70’s were allowed to store ammunition at home — this i leaned from my uncle, will have to check the books for it later to get a more exact note —

I thought for some time that the people within the army knew what they were doing, but apparently I was wrong.

Stupid fucks get people killed.

When i begun my foray into web-design I actually begun with disassembling a layout and using some of it’s visual elements — enough of them to get me into trouble — a kind person told me to try to go my own way via a private email exchange. at first i took it as insane mumblings. “i devoted hours into reversing the layout to understand the underlying semantics of css and visual design, who does he think he is? ” I thought to myself.

After a rude exchange courtesy of me I begun to understand what he was talking about as one of my own print designs were imitated by a colleague, that led to me being irritated for two weeks and being a constant pain in the butt to everyone in the office who tried to socialize with me whilst engrossed in my own foul mood.

you invest time and a lot of effort into understanding the underlying mechanisms of what makes a design admirable or publicly acceptable to your intended crowd, and some schmuck just rubs you the wrong way and rips the whole damn design off and redresses it into something that frankenstein would hump through eternity. — admittedly, this gutwrenching feeling isn’t something you want to experience. (and personally, i don’t wanna think of that statically charged freak doing the horisontal bugaloo ever again.)

These days it seems like I can’t get through a week without reading about how someone stole this design from this and that person, okay that is something I can live with.

but.

I think it would be more community fostering to discuss the morality of the issue with the person via a private exchange, be it IM or Email, that our community, the Web ecks-dot-ecks-ecks community — for lack of a better word — is a community of F R I E N D S.
I don’t think i’d've gotten the point that Thomas was trying to get across if he wasn’t being as understanding and knowledged on the subject as he is.

We live in a time where p2p reigns supreme — ergo mpaa and riaa pressurecookers — and where it is “sort of” okay to download copyright protected works of content producers (not withstanding the semantics of the whole copyright infringement theatre) young people of today more than anything will not, or do not, understand the issue with what’s not okay about “stealing” someone’s layout/design of a website.
We should frown upon the practice but we must also try to bridge the morality gap and foster an ethical agenda concerning how to best behave when stumbling upon the issue, WASP or another web oriented organization should try to take it upon themselves to further a social agenda within the field — I know AIGA has a charter of this kind –

I don’t think public ridicule — reminiscent of the shame pole of medieval times — is a proper way to go, understanding and education about the subject at hand is however, vital.

What if Google were evil? a question posed by Wired, to which sergey brin aptly replies “We were evil” (curiously enough at the sixth of june 2006) I can’t quite bring myself to call a company evil for meeting shareholder demands. there’s too much dynamics involved to be able to do a sober judgement of the business practices, one of which is corporate opaqueness.

In Eve we’re getting ready to launch our primary IPO and the last weeks we’ve been focusing on financial reports and ibank spreads.
The amazing thing with Eve is that the market functionality allows for market price statistics via an export function of region prices for single products. This has enabled me to play the mark^H^H^H^H proverbial piper, i’ve been collecting information, running the numbers and trying to see how different trade routes will pay off and if we dare to use our blockade runners through the badlands.
the Badlands is what i choose to call the low-security systems of Eve, we’ve been selling frigates and destroyers in some of the more trafficked badland systems, which has proven profitable by a power of 4 compared to rookie systems like the ever smartmobbed jita system.
The money is definetly in the contested systems.

“He just stood there and watched them beat the crap out of me!

Even a dog has got the brains to come to his master’s defense! Bite’em! Claw’em! Piss on ‘em! Anything for fuck’s sake!

Brawny grunt: Jesus, boss, you don’t look too good.

Another original thinker. ” — Bob Hoskins, racketeer and shylock in the movie “unleashed” also featuring Jet Li as “Danny” the kid raised as a dog.

technorati tags: Unleashed, Bob, Hoskins

NY Times broke the story; Microsoft is pushing their release of Windows Vista a couple of weeks further along, however, this is a technique the company has done before.

Vista was originally slated for release in 2004 as “Blackcomb” but later rebranded as Longhorn after being unveiled in the summer of 2005. Blackcomb has since become the successor to Vista and codenamed “Vienna”; Set for release in 2010, it is doubtfull to expect this release by then judging the current copland-esque track-record, the 500-billion cap be damned.

This protraction of development of the Vista product puts the light on the management and their handling of the Product. Other companies, most notably Apple and the now long dead company Be Inc released early seeds to the public and worked their way up from the well and into smooth products — albeit Apple still has issues like the usability of the finder and the multiple faces of their user interface.

Sadly this delay makes the product hit the market after the holiday sales market, which is one of the key events of the year for any company.

I’ve seen multiple posts by employee blogs confirming the new launch date but I’m still doubting it, seeing is believing as my dear grandmother used to say.
edit:
aha, they posted beta2 of vista for download on the web, and of course som fan-boys put up a torrent that got shut down by the Microsoft gorillas^H^H^H^H^Hlawyers.

technorati tags: apple, longhorn, macosx, blackcomb

“A vicious black swan has an additional elusive property: its very
unexpectedness helps create the conditions for it to occur. Had a terrorist
attack been a conceivable risk on Sept. 10, 2001, it would likely not have
happened.”

barring hindsight bias some thinktanks make the case that the Abqaiq incident will cause further trickle effects.

The terrorist cells of today operate in a much more decentralized way, ideology is shared while modes of execution differ. we should expect al qaeda to disrupt the middle east oil supply lines and refineries in a more effective way. this means that what we can expect are smaller and less difficult attacks on minor refinieries and pipes adding up to greater effects that in turn will add up to the effect of a full scale decimation of Abqaiq.

more here

technorati tags: terrorism, thinktank, abqaiq, blackswans

no this isn’t about bad splatter horror.

To many’s dislike, the bodymod and tattoo cultures have gone mainstream but like any fine popart there’s been an influx of culture and art preservators who want to exhibit the art on the museum floors.

One of these exhibitions is taking place at the Whitney Museum of American Art, it explores the viewpoints of bodymodification, how it relates as a disguise, a metaphore. and how some use it to record time’s passed by.

Skin Is a Language. 

technorati tags: tattoo, museum, exhibitions

And beckon the dark…

Fred Eerdekens is a Belgian artist who creates sculptures that magically distorts light and shadows to manipulate it into beautiful shapes.

He’s held exhibitions at the spencer brownstone gallery in their Armory show floor.

The basis of his sculptures are forms distorting light and shadows to create texts and other shapes as seen below. 

via. 

technorati tags: art, fineart, sculpture, lightmanipulation, light, shadows

Back when I started writing slash fiction and erotic novelettas — no I will not give away my nom de plum. –  I found myself in quite a quandry. I couldn’t find any decent writers applications for the mac, or windows for that matter.

What I ended up doing was to use Emacs — a despickable cli programmers editor — and whenever my editor wanted a copy i’d just open it in textedit and choose ‘print as pdf’ from the menu. Although it worked it was quite tedious, as you can imagine.

I eventually tried using a couple of applescripts together with barebonesoft’s  BBedit, which to me felt awkward and very os9-ish. I dropped it for emacs.

Now I did however find this recently, it’s a plugin bundle for textmate made by Oliver Taylor, works quite charmingly and i’ve begun to insert my drafts into the subversion server already.  Granted I could be doing all of the versioning and comparing with any editor, but Textmate is built for this in mind, I can diff document drafts and compare; without the need for umptyten tools.

via. 

technorati tags: texmate, osx, emacs, writing, textmate, subversion

The Boston Globe’s online edition is running an article about inked bluecollar workers and their impressions of how they’re treated at work.

Insanely interesting article and lovely artwork. 

technorati tags: ink, tattoo, bluecollar

Walther Nazi on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

aside from the viciousness of the logo owners, i never would’ve thought a nazi could do intriguing ornamental patterns. 

However, it fits their style. imprinting art on something used for death.

Swedish Prisons have always been the first refuge of easternblock gangsters who are lucky enough to score a room in our five-star accomodations, always vacant since the guests have such an easy time to get outside the gates.

technorati tags: sweden, prison, idiocy, incompetence

Microsofts identity guru Kim Cameron with coat draped around his head and using an apple ibook, tools of the trade or sun tzu style subterfuge?

technorati tags: apple, microsoft, identityguru, identity, credibility