Quixotica

Hullo there. I'm tuckered tonight, so grab your pillow and a cup of warm tea while I tell you a tale of telephone trivia. You see, the notion of a public telephone, that any damn fool hooligan off the street could step up to a payphone or duck into a general store and borrow the phone to make a call is rooted in American culture; at the dawn of national telecommunication systems, foreign nations found the idea distasteful. According to research presented by Bruce Sterling in The Hacker Crackdown, no nation was so quick to adopt the public telephone (and the freedom of speech it embodied) as the U.S. The French eschewed the idea of a national telephone system in favor of visual telegraphs, which were safe from meddling by the afore-mentioned hooligans; after all, any fool with a pair of shears and a streak of anarchism could slice the phone lines in a dozen different places and disappear without a trace. Naturally, the British were opposed to the idea of a public telephone because nobody wanted the voice of the lower classes barging into a gentleman's household unannounced.

Of course I'm basically just regurgitating a smidgen of the fascinating narrative spun out within the pages of The Hacker Crackdown, which is the first book we're reading over at the PCWorld Book Club. It's awfully silly, but I assure you we're committed to doing this dorky project up right; join us, won't you? The book is brief, engaging and (best of all) free, so hop in and tell us what you think in the comments section.

/plug

GDC 2011 starts tomorrow.

I'm of two minds about attending the Game Developers Conference with a press pass; on the one hand, it's literally an awesome show. Sitting in on talks like "Lay of the Land: Smarter AI Through Influence Maps" last year left me in awe of how brilliant these guys (alas, the majority are men) have to be when it comes to recreating reality. Only the best and brightest in the industry attend (GDC isn't cheap) and after sitting in on their discussions for a few days last year, I came to understand that they were essentially attempting to duplicate divine genesis on a yearly basis; the math, art and sheer magic required to render a believable virtual world is mind-blowing.

It's important for journalists and critics to get a glimpse of that creative process, to sit quietly in the back corner and try to keep up while the smart kids speak. I'm thankful that GDC affords us that luxury, but I'm also concerned that rising notoriety is causing the conference to devolve into another trade show. Press events and exclusive demos are springing up throughout the week, and I worry that will be to the detriment of the developers in attendance. Worse, it's our fault; journalists have pushed to get access for years, and where we go the PR professionals follow.

I love attending GDC because the atmosphere is so quiet, informal and off the record; I worry that my presence pollutes that atmosphere.

This is a barrage balloon.

Goofy as it may seem, you do not fuck with a barrage balloon; a common sight during WWII, these unmanned dirigibles were hung in the sky trailing thick cables to deter low-flying enemy aircraft. Evidently the anti-aircraft guns of the day weren't fast enough to track and fire on fast-moving targets at low altitudes; thus the barrage balloons were deployed to force enemy aircraft skyward into the sights of the ground-bound AA guns.

Sometimes the Allies attached explosives to the drag cables, just to fuck low-flying bombers up that much more.

Bihr Aphteh Wurkk, A Strategy Guide

Level 1: Lord & Master

The first round is pretty straightforward, a quick tutorial to get you accustomed to the controls in a social situation. Once the game is loaded you arrive around 4:30 on a Wednesday, so the bar will be clear; quickly follow your teammates to the hanging platform and immediately claim your territory. The table in the back corner has clear sight lines across all approach vectors, so throw your jacket down with the rest of the squad and immediately take point on drink orders.

Sidle up to the bar, deliver the order and make nice with the bartender: avoid paying with cash, as you will want to keep a tab open for the next stage.

Deliver the beer gracefully, and ration yours to last as long as possible; perversely, the Lord & Master will actually damage your health and taste buds with every sip. You can visit the men's room for a quick refresh, but you shouldn't need it this early in the game; instead, make sure to sip your beer at measured intervals to keep pace with the rest of the squad. If you fall too far behind everyone else, the final challenge will trigger and force you to shotgun the rest of your glass in one gulp.

Level 2: Imperial Jack

Now things start to get interesting. The second level starts at 6:30 on a Friday night, so the bar is thick with South Park technocrats; hang back on the first approach and let your squad leader take point on the drink orders. Background noise is pretty bad up front, so don't try to cherry-pick your loadout; it's not worth the ego damage. Instead, choose the "I'll have what he's having" option and make sure to turn in your Strong Beer drink ticket to get credit for quest completion. Don't lose the ticket, or you'll have to start the whole game over again.

This level is pretty fast-paced and devoid of seating, so you'll have to conserve energy while balancing the weight of your glass and keeping up a steady stream of quips for the team. The difficulty curve will ramp up pretty steeply in the next level, so make sure to develop relationships with your squad now; you'll need their help to beat the final boss.

For now, just focus on mastering your social control and balancing your beer intake with leveling your wit and levity. A hidden shortcut will appear near the end of the level when it starts to rain; take it and head for the exit, making sure to hit the men's room for another health refresh if you need it.

Sorry, but I'm spent. My typical day starts with a 7:40 alarm; I roll out of bed to shower and perform my daily ablutions before hitting the train station around 8:30. With luck I'll make the office by 9, work until 6ish, stop by the gym for an hour after work and walk home. I get home around 8:30 or 9 pm, cook dinner and finish up some leftover work, read a book or get some game time in. Rinse, repeat.

That said, it's 11:45 pm and I've spent all day writing, thinking or talking about things to write about. All I have to offer tonight is the unsubtle insight that tech journalism is often a field haunted by hungry ghosts scrounging scraps from the corpse of society.

You see, technology is really the story of human tool-making; in that sense, the story of technology is the story of what separates man from beast. Human society, language and art are tools for self-improvement, just like the latest smartphone or MacBook. It's worthwhile to wriggle free from the churn sometimes to break surface, touch sky and take a moment to breathe and wonder about what we have and can become.

I haven't made much time to browse the web for fun, but ZOMGscience is light in all the right places.

Alex is a quarter century old; his likes include fuji apples, the color green and not being dead.

I am having a hell of a time trying to push my way through Gravity's Rainbow. Every night I conquer two or three - well, they're not really chapters, let's call them sections - of the book before I've had my fill. So far I'm averaging about 10-20 pages a night, which seems stultifyingly slow; yet when I'm reading I rarely feel like I'm struggling at all. Instead, every sentence seems to hide subtle twists of phrase and underhanded wit that encourage multiple readings and much mulling over; it's the first time I've found the level of detail and subtlety that makes classic art so interesting to visit and revisit in the pages of a post-modern novel.

That said, I'm still only 60 pages into a 600-page novel that I started two weeks ago. I'm in no hurry to finish, but I do rather regret all the time I'm sinking into this book that I could be spending shooting dudes in the face.

Speaking of which, GDC is totally next week and I never even bothered to check out the schedule. So that's cool.

Practicing guitar instead of writing because I met a cute girl who plays guitar.

She writes as well, but...baby steps.

I read something last night. Tim Ferriss' latest dare-to-be-awesome tract is hardly an inkhorn text, but I assure you that since shedding the shibboleths of my younger, swarthier self I have had difficulty sitting still for any endeavour. The time I can devote to a piece of media depends on the format: while I can usually manage a good 150 minute movie and work my way through a game an hour or two at a time, I still have trouble reading the same text for more than thirty minutes without nodding off. It's a curious and troubling development; when I was a kid I regularly burned through reams of cheap fantasy, adventure and historical fiction in my free time.

Let's put aside the anamnesic drivel for a moment: might the changes I made in my personal life to exact physiological change have affected my ability and interest in sedentary activities? Any day in which I don't walk at least 5 miles is physically torturous; I have trouble sleeping or concentrating, and small headaches develop when I can't move or stretch for an extended period of time. The Internet isn't helping; I have trouble focusing on a single page or story for more than a minute, and closing Google Chrome without 10+ unread tabs is a small, sweet victory.

Last night I read an exhortation from Ferriss to shed complacency, to welcome physical change as a catalyst for personal growth; he suggests that even the smallest changes can be maintained, improved upon and eventually lead to startling and seemingly impossible physiological feats. This matches my personal experience. Furthermore, he suggests that improving physiologically may significantly change seemingly unrelated areas of your personal life, to wit: losing weight or becoming stronger, faster or tougher tends to increase confidence and self-respect, which in turn improves how others tend to perceive you. In my experience, this is also true.

But what about the costs? What do we sacrifice for a life with so much emphasis on what is happening right now, at this moment? My father has oft encouraged me to focus on what is enjoyable about the moment, to savor the unique ups and downs of every stage of life; it's great and terribly Buddhist of him. But so much of "higher" education is future-focused: past the immediate lessons one learns throughout the natural course of life, sitting down to consciously educate oneself is a hedge against the future. Learning a language or a history has no immediate application or benefit; it's one of the benefits of quizzes and tests, that we can test and use the fragments of a skill before it has fully formed. How can we resolve personal agency and self-direction with the mandate to simply live in the moment?

I predict the first AI will be a vast network of Twitter spambots who endlessly RT so much they spontaneously achieve sentience.

Filed my taxes. Beat Enslaved. Cooked some awesome huevos rancheros, and benched 155 for reps. Also, saw ten cops pull two dudes out of a bodega at gunpoint. As far as ranking lazy Sundays go, today placed pretty well.

Oddly, my estimated 2010 refund is...quite significant. I guess I'll put it away for a down payment on my next place, a decision which is terribly mature and dull. I think it might cover the cost of a one-way plane ticket anywhere in the world; strange to think I have that kind of freedom.

A rainy day means all my plans are cancelled, which means instead of trudging to a party uptown I'm bumming around the house beating Enslaved.

This is acceptable.

The game is good and interesting to boot, claiming (loose) inspiration from the Chinese fable of a Buddhist monk's journey to India. Apparently it's one of the Four Great Classical Novels, novels which I am now resolved to tackle in the time allotted me. I've always felt ill-read when it comes to classic literature, but there's just so damn much of it; I'm working my way through Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow as well as a smorgasbord of other stuff (Chaucer, Ferriss, Allen and Ba) and while I haven't made much progress in any of the above, I should be able to knock out the greatest hits of Chinese classic literature in less than a year thanks to their cultural knack for hyperbole and grandiose titles.

Big words, I know.

I've watched many old friends make choices I don't agree with, and now it's happening again. A few equally old friends are up in arms about the move, but I can't muster the energy to give a shit any longer; we're supposed to be adults, and adults are mature enough to allot each other a modicum of respect and room to make their own mistakes. I want to be the kind of person who can maintain a mature relationship tinged with regret, love and a lack of respect without resorting to turgid theatrics; I wash my hands of the matter.

If this weather keeps up I'll beat this game by Monday, find time to write my monthly column and pick up a pair of these totes sweet brown cordarounds to boot. Not only that, but Strong Beer on Wednesday? It's gonna be a good week.

It's sort of uncomfortable, how the Facebook designers have reduced friendship to an algorithm.

I think if you don't like maps, we can't really be friends. Cartography is an art that guides in very clear terms; movies, books and music take you to a different place and time, while maps remind you where you could be if you left the daydream behind.

21st Amendment isn't fucking around with their Strong Beer Month promotion, but after sacking up for the past two weeks I've earned five stars and a taste for barley wine. I had a few drinks with friends after work yesterday; I was the only middle-class white male between the age of 18 and 34. Our conversation became a circus, and it wasn't long before the twin elephants of Race and Gender in Media dominated the center ring.

We discussed the hard knock life. In hindsight, my life has been pretty much perfect. I was taunted in grade school, and my parents and I had a few rough years when I was young and (willfully) ignorant. Yet no man has ever had cause or courage to raise his hand against me, and I have never suffered for lack of food, shelter or love. My parents are not divorced or dead, and my sister is pretty chill.

The only social stigmata I have ever suffered due to my appearance have been dry dating periods and being chosen last for high school basketball; I have no interest in race or gender politics, and I do not consciously permit these traits to influence decisions regarding myself or other people. I am wholly outside the discussion.

I have been denigrated before for my lack of interest and cushy upbringing; I find such behavior humbling and a little incongruous with our hope for a better future. My life has been ideal; don't you want the same for your children? You can rail and moan against the zeitgeist, but nobody worth respecting raises their babies to be fighters. To be the best parent you can be, raise your children the way my parents raised me. Then you too can produce happy, productive and content human beings who will passively clown on the future zeitgeist. Would you then deplore them for not suffering through a life of hardship?



Fuck yeah! Menswear!

I'm not done yet.

Some friendly PR types brought a dozen or so 3DS demo units to the office today, and after the GamePro folks had their fill we wrangled an hour of hands-on time for ourselves. I wish I could say we brought all the class and atmosphere of a shady backroom deal, two teams of four questionable characters facing each other across a Lucite no man's land as a dozen prototype units change hands.

Hardly. After an hour goofing around with the hardware, I can tell you it works, and it works well; if the case is durable and the battery can hold strong through sustained use it's going to be a very successful product. Quixotically, the 3D effect is the least interesting aspect of the 3DS; it works and it's entrancing for about half an hour, but it's quite limited in the illusion of depth generated; most of the games and movies we saw topped out at what appeared to be an inch or so of simulated depth. Presumably this is due in part to the need for all games to be enjoyable in 2D as well as 3D, but the small screen also trivializes the experience.

Playing with these devices, I came to understand that part of the appeal of 3D movies like Avatar or Tron: Legacy is the feeling of existing partially within the story and being able to peer past the first "layer" of 3D to explore the scenery at my own discretion. Since different levels of the background now have different priority depth-wise, I perceive a clear hierarchy without a clear ranking system of importance (excluding the action of the film.) The screen is so large it takes me up to a full second or two to swing my eyes around and refocus on different layers of the scenery, and thus I feel more active and engaged in the fiction of the film.

That feeling of exploring a world was not present when I played a few minutes of a few 3DS launch titles like Pilotwings and Steel Diver, and I think it may well be because the screen is just physically smaller and more limited when simulating depth.

To be clear, the games were still quite enjoyable; I just feel that the hype surrounding the first portable 3D gaming system may leave a few folks underwhelmed, especially when you consider that the 3DS games available when the system launches are pretty unimpressive. The AR stuff that comes packed in with the system is arguably more exciting, though the AR game we saw today was just a simple snipe hunt designed to show off the tech.

I had to consult Facebook to remember what sorts of music I liked; a clear signal that it's time to punch out on life.

I don't really miss Ireland any longer, but I sort of miss missing Ireland.

In a similar vein, I don't have any great passion for The Big Lebowski, video games or expensive cameras, but I really like people who like those things.

Today I learned that hagiography is the study of saints.

Also, Gravity's Rainbow is exceedingly well-written and perplexing to peruse without a Google page handy. I should stop buying so many books.

I briefly interviewed Georgia Weidman this afternoon; she's a security nerd who recently presented her Android botnet at ShmooCon 2011, the latest in a long line of hacker-centric security conferences held annually in D.C. I'll be writing up our interview this weekend for a Privacy Watch column so I won't bore you with the details here (plus I'm itching to dig back into Alpha Protocol, but what's so interesting about her work is that she's developed one of the first Android botnets that communicates via SMS instead of IP. This is important because SMS messaging places much less strain on the battery than constantly checking in with the C&C via your Android smartphone's modem, and her code operates within the base OS beneath the application layer so the user has no idea he or she has been infected.

Essentially, if Georgia can get you to download a bot builder on your phone (either packaged inside a cool-looking app or from a third-party website) she can build a malicious program in your phone that can access all the data going in or out of your phone and communicate with everyone in your contact list without you ever having a clue. It's pretty cool shit.

Pretending to write about printer security and listening to some of my favorite jams from junior high, high school, big kid college and junior college.

Guess it's easier to just call it Orange County Radio: hitting the greatest hits of your most embarrassing lows.

I met an old sorta-kinda-sometimes-totally friend for coffee on Sunday. She just quit her shitty retail job for a slightly less shitty desk job as a temp with a pharmaceutical reimbursement consulting company.

This friend, she's got style. Anger. Passion. She needs something from life, and looks at this job as something to keep a roof over her head while she tries to figure out a better way to satisfy that need. It's a strange way to live; sometimes I flirt with the notion that work is what you do when you're not out having a life, but it never seduces me completely. I'm not content to work just to live, but neither am I living for the work I'm doing. In a sense, it's a case of separation anxiety; my personal persona and the one I wear at work can't be kept apart, but neither can they coexist quietly.

Do you work to live, live to work or just...live?

Today I learned many things.

I learned the secret trick to getting past the locked gate that seals Noisebridge. Once inside, I sat and talked shop with a number of network security buffs; one of the most fascinating things I learned was how difficult it is to prosecute hackers due to the global reach of the Internet.

For example, let's say Korean Hacker A builds a botnet that scrapes credit card data. Your system is compromised, and now there's a text file containing your account and identity data on a server in Croatia.

We know where it is, but how do we secure the right to cross into Korean jurisdiction to arrest a citizen for data stolen in one country and stored in another? If a U.S. citizen has been targeted we have a bargaining chip, but what if that hard drive in Croatia holds damning personal data from people across the globe? Who can you trust to safely dispose of that data? Is it any better that the agents of a foreign government possess the keys to your identity, instead of some anonymous Croatian citizen?

Curiouser and curiouser.

Also, this was taped to the bathroom wall; nerd graffiti.

I have an ancient secret for you: in the dark before the dawn of the 20th century, Austrian military leaders seriously considered employing bicycles as engines of war.



Credit for unearthing this ancient history goes to the History of Ideas blog, curated by the folks at J.F. Ptak Books.

I took my ball and went to Twitter, now I'm bringing it back where it belongs.

One post a day. No refunds, no regrets.

On the weekends I meander down to Philz for a morning cup of coffee. I pay $5 to shelter for a moment amidst the pleasant peculiarity of a coffee haus that plops a honkin' great grey monolith of an ancient ATM smack dab in the center of an ever-shifting mandala with arms of overstuffed armchairs and spokes formed from old wooden park benches. Come for the coffee, stay for the calculated eccentricity.

This morning one of the cashiers kindly helped me seat a disposable lid atop my steaming styrofoam cup. He's an elderly gentleman with a passion for jaunty headwear, reliably classy when it comes to both his service and his sense of personal style; when I complemented him on his facility for fixing flimsy coffee cup lids, he smiled and claimed it was an ancient secret.

There ought to be more ancient secrets.