Oh, Tonight

I'm having a great week. Today I started reading William Gibson's Neuromancer and, well, things are looking up.

In a very coincidental way, I've been priming myself for this book all week. Monday I had lunch with Davers and we talked about art, culture, Internet, and the catharsis of expression. You know, Davers things. And yesterday, me and Higgy traded witticisms and insight over the process of creating writing.

So-- of course-- today I was sucked into the book that defined cyberspace and inspired a generation of nerds to build a world of their own creation. Tomorrow, I'll probably get visited my Morpheus.

I become entranced by something dark and familiar when I read about cyberpunk power brokering and bleak cityscapes that offer nothing but anonymity. It's the same feeling I get when my old mainstay, Turn on the Bright Lights, kicks through my car stereo at night. The feeling escapes words but it's definitively me. It's nighttime. It's gritty but not vulgar. Carefree but not cruel.

Say what you will about memory biases, but I swear: This feeling has welled up in me since I started listening to Interpol.

Oops. Gibson has totally borked my writing voice. I'm spending way too much time trying to thread together sentences that convey emotional whims with machine-like precision. Time to unjack from this terminal.

Note to self: Figure out how to update Blogger from Lynx.

On a More Positive Note!

I'm really excited to see how much attention The Social Network is garnering from critics in the run-up to the Academy Awards. When I saw the movie with my mom earlier this year, we both left the theater quite impressed with its performance on all the traditional moviemaking benchmarks: Reznor's brilliant but not overbearing soundtrack, the cinematography and Sorkin's trademark wit sharpened by the lens of incredible acting.

More importantly, though, I left the theater feeling downright capable of doing something magnificent on my own. I felt empowered. Not over-empowered, like I could be the next boy billionaire. More like... I dunno. Like I might one day have an idea that could touch a lot of peoples' lives. And that felt good.

Hollywood (and art as a whole) has a social responsibility to warn us-- within reason-- of the dangers and tradeoffs that accompany wealth, fame, and an unchecked hunger for power. But they also have a responsibility to inspire us. The Social Network did both, and I think that's really, really cool.

Efficiency

Efficiency. Doing things in the shortest amount of time with the fewest resources has always been an obsession of mine. It's why I went into engineering. It's why I get such a kick out of helping businesses work efficiently with well-designed software solutions. It's why I've Google Maps'd, tested and re-tested the hell out of every route and shortcuts to and from work.

I may not be 100% efficient 100% of the time, but dammit, there's an untold elegance in getting a jobs done simply and quickly. And I'm quirky about it.

I caught this article in the latest issue of Wired about the IOI: The International Olympiad in Informatics. The kids are savants on a level that is both foreign and frightening to me. But my god-- is there anything more beautiful than 22 lines of Pascal tearing through a multi-dimensional dataset? I posit not.

Reading through the article, you'll notice that the USA doesn't excel at the IOI in a way you might expect the birthplace of the Internet, personal computer and Furby to excel. Perhaps our performance is a criticism of this country's math and science education standards. Maybe we need to start teaching programming at a younger age. But I doubt it. After all, do you think China and Belarus really have better math and science programs than the United States?

Eh. Actually, maybe they do :-/ But no. The quality of education isn't necessarily the issue.

I just don't think American culture, as a whole, appreciates efficiency the way other nations of the world have learned, out of necessity, to appreciate it. The America I see every day cares about jobs done right and gives bonus points for efficiency. The rest of the world demands efficiency out of necessity. Lack of food. Lack of space. Lack of labor. Lack of technology.

I'm not saying the best coders in the world grew up poor and hungry. Hardly. What I'm saying is this: When you have a deep, personal connection to the realities of scarcity-- maybe in your neighborhood, maybe in your own home-- you begin to make efficiency a part of everything you do. And that sort of edge can really make all the difference, whether you're in a high school coding competition or vying for a promotion in your company.

Something to think about.

I need a more efficient way to find good new music. Any of you Belarusian kids out there wanna design me the next Pandora, so I can get my electro on?

Think Small

It's weird how inspiration can come from the most random places. An inspirational link and a quick conversation with my brother and, quite suddenly, I'm ready to start writing on this thing once again.

It all started quite innocuously this morning: Get to the office, throw on a cup of coffee and check reddit for all the easy-to-digest liberal nerd rage I can bite off with my dulled political chops. Years of caring too much have turned me from a youthfully deaf, rabid Michael Moore wannabe into one of those more sage, jaded liberals who believes in the goodness of sharing and equality but is disheartened by the empty promise of politics in America.

I noticed one particular headline that suddenly cranked my fatigued morning brain into overdrive:

This is interesting: Julian Assange's old blog. (web.archive.org)

A blog written by an academic from 2006-2007 touching on some high-minded topics such as freedom of information, love, life and humor? Interspersed with random snippets of useful Ruby code? All on a very non-flashy, flat-style page? Totally fucking early 2000's nostalgia! Where do I sign up?

To me, Assange has never been the enigmatic, borderline Aspy with a serious case of US butthurt that many media outlets have attempted to mis-characterize. To me, he's a man who values the academic principle of openness more than the academic definition of journalism. And that pragmatic attitude garners a lot of respect from me.

Professors and pundits alike may argue all day about the proportions of journalism, recklessness, integrity, fairness and freedom that constitute the WikiLeaks initiative. At the end of the day, though, WikiLeaks itself (especially with this latest iteration of leaked cables) is not dismantling the institutions it highlights. At least, not on its own. They're dismantling the facade. They're exposing the way the world works in a very candid way, leaving the accountability in the hands of those who dare to lie, mislead or at the very least not educate the public at large.

I think that's cool, because history tends to favor openness and expression.

Anyways, back to that blog.

Breezing through the international pariah's random, somewhat intimate wisdom, I found myself awash in one big, awesome thought: He blogs for the same reason I have to blog. To put my ideas out there. To reflect and check myself in a public space. To share and clarify and sharpen my position instead of keeping it in my head. I feel like those higher goals are evident in Assange's blog as they are in this one.

Blogging for me has always been more than just an indulgent exercise in narcissism, though I'd be lying if I said that wasn't some significant part of it :-) It's a giant "you are here, and this is where you've been" map for life. I do re-read my shit on occasion. I bet you're not surprised.

Honestly, I know myself well enough to know that I have never been able to keep track of myself well in my head. I lose myself. I make myself crazy with the sort of deprecating, self-defeating nonsense that left me depressed and insular for the better part of this year. But when I unleash the stream of consciousness into a finite bitstream for public consumption, well, those self-defeating thoughts get pulverized like errant letters by a springy, loud, 80's style backspace button.

So thanks to Mr. Assange for helping me realize and see the importance of writing on my blog once again.

I also chatted a bit with my brother today and, together, we came to another conclusion: That each blog post doesn't have to be some big odyssey of a tome. It feels like everything I've written in the past year or so is some historical essay on the recent life I've been living up to that point. But that sort of defeats the purpose I was just talking about. What I ended up with this year was three or four giant characterizations of my life based on those pivotal moments when I was so emotional or worked-up that I just exploded with prose. But those aren't honest. They're moving, but they're not necessarily me on-the-whole.

The odyssey isn't each constituent post. The odyssey is the blog.

(oops, I ended up saying way more than I thought I would. oh well. I promise the next post will come soon, and be small. twss?)

How I didn't spend my summer vacation

If you've been in mourning for the past few weeks because you figured I was eaten by rats, fear not: I've not fallen prey to rats or fleas or vampires or anything in the complex ecosystem thriving under my floorboards. Instead I was swallowed up by the summer and a very fire-and-forget lifestyle.

For the past few months now-- summer, essentially-- I've been neglecting my blog and instead Tweeting my life away in 140-character blurbs. Every day I wake up, drive to work, and spend every moment of my downtime following Tweets about Houston restaurants, Billy Mays, fonts, social media, open education, and local drink specials.Then I throw my own two cents in to the mix. And since I'm the social media guy at work, I spend a good amount of my "uptime" perusing Twitter and Facebook. It's a job most guys would kill to have.

...except I can feel the toll it's starting to take on my personality (and my brain). I was built to do and reflect, not to do and forget. Twitter and other tools of the so-call social revolution put so much emphasis on the "now" that it's easy to forget to stop and smell the roses. Whereas I used to pause and carefully consider the implications of the respective past few days in my semi-regular blog posts, Twitter allows me only 140 characters to state the bare minimum before moving on to the next big event in my life. Or your life. So many lives, so much information.

If this blog has served any purpose in the past eight years, it's at least been a good place to sort the wheat from the chaff.

I have honestly reached the limit of how much data I can consume and regurgitate and sort in one day. I go to bed feeling like the 1997 New York Stock Exchange is trading Microsoft in my head. And for all this processing and grief, what do I have to show for it? Nothing. I retain little or nothing more than the ability to gloat about hearing news first, whatever that news may have been.

I've got to push something useless out of my head before classes start back up. Gotta make room for senior year in there, somewhere.

Need more mémoire magnétique

The knuckles of my greedy, nimble, download-hungry fingers are painfully scraping up against the Iron Curtain of available hard drive space.


After years of Torrenting discographies of obscure electro bands and blues legends for no-good-reason, my 160GB laptop hard drive is just about full. I've resorted to cramming senseless data in the nooks and crannies of my dedicated Windows partition. After all, deleting things is not an option.

My 60BG external laptop drive now waffles between 1BG and 0GB free depending on which disposable episode-of-the-night I've thrown onto it. I need a few more cobalt-alloy platters. The question is where they will live, and how I'll be utilizing them.

So just buy more, you say. I dread buying an external hard drive-- I really do. I begrudgingly bought an enclosure for my old 60GB laptop hard drive back when I upgraded to 160GB internal (because having 60GB of potential storage gathering dust is the dumber of two dumbs). Now it serves to hold all the obscure TV shows I downloaded once-upon-a-time and have no intention of watching again anytime soon along with ISO backups of my software, big movie project files, and some other critical backup shit. But even with my one external drive holding almost nothing of significance, I sometimes find myself on-campus or at-work wishing I had easy access to them.

See, I believe that humankind is too far along its technological renaissance to justify carrying around anything except a laptop with a network connection and a power cord. Some may argue that this isn't necessarily convenient if I don't have an Internet connection, but I can get a connection more often than I would ever want to carry around an external drive. Also, I break things.

What I want/need is remote storage. Rice affords me a measly gig of network storage and, honestly, I could do with another 499. But Rice's servers aren't, you know, a long-term solution for me. If I owned both a desktop and a laptop I could buy external drives and turn my desktop into a file host and do all of this myself but, unfortunately, I live in the one computer per Kyle third world. I don't need another computer: I need GIGZ.

Anyone out there have the perfect storage solution they want to tell me about? Or am I doomed to live in hard disk hell, constantly choosing between some 1980's-era Eric Clapton live album and a cliche freshman-year film to delete?

Who has time for morals?

It feels like the media is grasping at straws in its attempts to talk about Twitter these days. First it was a caricature of our high-speed society, then suddenly it was the hip playground for those with an overinflated sense of self-importance. As if blogs weren't bad enough, now you don't even have to write to be popular. Please, God, either foresake me for having an account or call me up to glorious electro-heaven where video bloggers drink Sparkz with Kevin Rose and fist-pump to mashups by the next Girl Talk.

A little technophobic writeup on CNN.com decries fast-paced, 140-character Tweets as the mental equivalent of TMI. According to the article, downing nibbles of information every hour of every day doesn't give us enough time to digest the moral implications of what we're reading.

Seriously? I think that's a stretch.

I think that (for the most part) Tweets are very fire-and-forget, dull happenings in peoples' lives. Sure, there's an occasional "my heart is sad" interspersed among the more familiar "I just ate a burrito at Cafe Adobe" and "@tfaust dicks," but is our generation really becoming so shallow that we use Twitter as anything more than a jumping-off point for a real conversation?

Twitter is a tool used by the Houston Chowhounds to find and felate each other during downtown lunchtime. It's used by readers of Houstonist so that they can throw a technological buzzword into their pub crawl. But is it really causing us to become a demoralized society?

You tell me.

[Scientists warn of Twitter dangers - CNN.com]

Science fiction and you!

I've been a busy little bee lately. Between bouts of scouring Downtown Houston for bits of my identity and diligently coding away at work I stumbled upon this interesting article on io9.com. For those of you who don't read io9, it's basically a science/technology wankfest of a Gawker blog that appeals to my constant desire to be force-fed nerdy, delicious news-- like a Slashdot that appeals to people under the age of 40 or 400 pounds, whichever comes first.

The aforementioned article poses some relatively deep questions about the relation of science fiction to science fact, like how our blooming imaginations have the effect of shaping research, engineering, and society's perceptions of the former two. It certainly points out some classic examples of negative (if not cautious) influence-- rampant AI in the Terminator series, genetic engineering in Gattaca, unchecked scientific endeavors in Frankenstein, et cetera. Those works of sci-fi have not only served as pervasive warnings to scientists of the dangers of unguided technology, but also hampered research in those respective fields due to the unjust fears they peddle. The list of fictional works that have made positive impact, on the other hand, is a bit harder to compile. I mean, this article cites WALL-E as shaping sentient robotics and environmental awareness, for chrissake. Talk about a stretch.

My thoughts on the subject are a little biased, being an engineer myself. I can ashamedly, albeit with a smirk, admit that playing Half-Life all throughout my adolescence got me interested in quantum technologies. I mean, portals? Entanglement? Strange matter? Popular media certainly has a way to inspire us to delve further into a subject and educate ourselves properly.

My biggest irk with popular media that tries to make a point about technology is that, well, most people are stupid. I'm no objectivist, though-- I think Ayn Rand was a pretentious [word that McCain called his wife] who tried to tie her selfish worldview into a philosophy, and that the thinkers of the world should indeed answer to the authority of the masses.

But people are generally stupid. Stupid people are more than willing to affirm themselves as experts on a subject after seeing one Hollywood blockbuster that touches upon it. How many people are probably scared shitless (or at least overly wary) of the concept of artificial intelligence after seeing all the Matrix films? How many senators, world leaders, policy shapers, and gatekeeprs probably learned everything they know about engineered foodstuffs from Soylent Green? How many people know nothing about genetic research outside what they read in Marvel comics?

Those movies were written with the expressed purpose of being entertaining, NOT as educational films to be broadcast to seventh graders during science class. And yet that happens all the time. The scientific community is then at the whims of voters who know nothing about the scientific world but the fear instilled upon them by popcorn-laden Saturday matinées.

And that's no good for a kid who wants to build space lasers and teleportation devices.

Is there any easy solution to rectifying society's perceived fears of potentially life-changing, beneficial science? I suppose that harping on the "educate the masses" argument sure would be a start. More importantly, though, I think that artists on all fronts need to realize the impact that their works have on fields of seemingly unrelated research.

After all, it's the dumb people that are handing out the grants.

Ego-inflating week!

I've been basking in the stench of my own petard for the past ten days. It's pretty ridiculous, really. Starting with that Standard parody and followed by my campus-uniting Thresher article, I've been getting five times the daily recommended dosage of positive hippie vibes. Random-ish people around campus are stopping to shake my hand and congratulate me on a job well done. Not-so-random people are even taking the time to berate me for being a total jerk on the Internet. Couple that with a hearty serving of, oh, INTERPOL last Tuesday and you've got a Big Kid's Ego Meal, complete with fries, a soft drink, and a little toy that tells me that I'm special.

I mean, I'm still lethargic and sarcastic and all those other, darker things you love about me. I'm just smiling ear to ear on the inside. And now I'm synonymous with Waffle House. Who could honestly ask for more?

I could and I will. I need a new laptop.

Look, I know my laptop works fine. But two years is a long time; everyone knows that after two years everything dies, including children and relationships and weblogs. My laptop is starting to spew and sputter. Nothing that a good memory replacement and maybe a new hard drive couldn't fix but, honestly, that's really not the only problem I'm having with it. The problem is that when I bought my laptop two years ago, I wasn't thinking about practical considerations such as, oh, size. My mindset has shifted from "I bet I can watch movies on this thing with COLLEGE GIRLS with BOOBS and FRUITY LIPGLOSS," to "I really wish I could take this thing to class and play on FACEBOOK so I can waste time until SUBSTANCE ABUSE." So the really bright, fifteen-inch screen isn't really necessary anymore.

And such is the story of growing up-- worrying more about practical considerations than how Secretary will look from the foot of your single-sized bed. This is why everyone over forty is sexless and hateful.

So what I need is a little thirteen-inch sumbitch. I was thinking that the newer generation of Asus W7S laptops look pretty fucking stellar. Something that will fool my friends into thinking I bought a Macbook Pro until I open it up and it's running some backfucked version of Vista. Something in glossy black. Or glossy white. I'm sort of up in the air on that issue.

Or I could tough it out. BE A MAN.

I had my entire way of life summarized as being "morally reprehensible" the other day. I better run to my blog and complain about it! Quick, someone, tell me I'm special!

Oh, wait, I have a button for that. It's called "Publish Post."

I did something you can use!

In between bouts of doing work and reading about different types of piercings on Wikipedia, I've actually done something that every Rice student could probably benefit from--

Presenting The (Slightly Unofficial) Rice University Academic Calendar!
I painstakingly copy-pasted every single event from the Summer and Fall '07 sessions into Google Calendar. If you're anything like me, you can benefit from having every single little holiday and pass/fail deadline set in front of you. So if anyone uses GCal or iCal, knock yourselves out...

Rice University Academic Calendar (Summer Sessions 2007)
XML | iCal | HTML

Rice University Academic Calendar (Fall Semester 2007)
XML | iCal | HTML

Corrections are welcome. Just don't be a dick about it. And if you try to tell me this is available FROM RICE somewhere else, I'm going to just cry.

And how are classes going, DOUCHE?

So glad you asked.

I was originally signed up for eighteen hours this semester because in all of Kyle's infinite wisdom he figured that he could actually handle that sort of work load. You know, because weekly problem sets in Intro to EE II, Waves and Photonics, and Intro to Computer Engineering on top of a total of twelve novels in my English distribution courses sounds like a great way to spend my time here at Rice. I guess I was a bit naive, though I tend to be dumb from time to time.

I'm totally dropping the harder of my two English classes and saving a pass-fail for next year. That'll drop me down to a paltry fifteen hours and still put me ahead of the game for the year. I'm so glad I took 17 hours last semester!

Steve Jobs pooped out the iPhone today. As much as I hate Steve Jobs for popularizing the concept of being a douchebag about the technology you own, you have to admit that the iPhone is pretty damn sexy. My question would be, of course, why NO ONE THOUGHT OF THIS BEFORE. Is it really that hard to shit out some existing technology built on a full-size touchscreen and gloss it over with shiny black plastic? Put me in a room with a pen and paper and tell me I can't leave until I come up with a genuinely original, money making piece of unique technology that will sell billions of units. It would honestly take me two hours.

Not that I think I'm smarter than, say, the entire staff at Microsoft which birthed an MP3 player based on buzzwords.

Let's see... let's see... what else...

Reality is really raining on the parade I had prepared for myself about this coming semester. Things have been going fairly well thus far but, dammit, a lot of things could be going a whole lot better. I'd love to talk more about my emotions on my blog but it's too popular and I import it into Facebook. This thing is for making people laugh and just slighting hinting at the fact that I am in fact a person with feelings.

It's sort of hard to take me seriously on here, anyway. If I said something like "I cried today" or "I have an honest fear that someone I live with might stab me in my sleep because I'm always an asshole," you wouldn't know whether I was joking or serious. I should probably start writing in my see-cret journal. It's got lots of hearts and ponies doodled in the margin.

Or maybe I'm just not playing enough Pokemon.

I can say, however, that I am in the middle of some very intense litigation with my former husband Ben Churchwell. You should poke him so I can win child custody. Just don't poke him too much: we're still in an open relationship.

Oh man, I totally forgot you could link pokes. I should take advantage of that more often... giggle giggle.

People say I look very, very dressed up when I put on the sweaters I got for Christmas. To them, I pass on this classic Weezer lyric.

If you want to destroy my sweater
hold this thread as I walk away

Houston Cares

It's a lazy Sunday by anyone's typical definition. I woke up around 2:30 to find that Mikey and Dayna were back from whatever and that the 90s ensemble is once again complete. Good thing, too, because we only have a week to plan for this little shindig we're throwing.

Reality about the coming semester is starting to sink in slowly. Eighteen hours of reality plus a good, healthy dose of social snafu and dammit, I have to mail my family's Christmas presents to them sometime before March. I think this semester's book cost, even if I drop one of my English classes, is going to come out to somewhere between $400 and $FUCK. I'll hit up the Amazon tomorrow and see if I can find some better prices than the Rice Rape Dungeon bookstore.

I truly have enjoyed these last carefree days before the semester starts, though. Nothing but YouTube during the day and drunken stupor during the nights. I've decided I can concede defeat and admit myself to be a YouTube whore but only because Google owns YouTube. Speaking of Google, if you spend any amount of time at all browsing, say, journals and blogs and stupid shit like that then boy do I have the tool for you. Google Reader. It's all rather self-explanatory, but basically it takes in RSS feeds and spits them all out on one page. It's a lot easier than having a big-ass list of bookmarks.

The upbeat of the past two weeks is starting to waver again. Someone help me keep tempo.

Ah, Funny.

Finally, one of my editor-in-chief columns from the high school newspaper.

America: home of apple pie, Wednesday night board games with the family, the Boys and Girls Club, and Sesame Street. The United States is definitely the pinnacle of moral values and innocence in the world, right? We have Elmo and Kermit teaching kids that name-calling is reproachable and that fun stems from cooperation. We have radio evangelist James Dobson working to get that heathen homosexual SpongeBob SquarePants off of the airwaves. And we have President George Bush instituting that the United States will not fund groundbreaking scientific innovations for the sake of moral justice.

That's all gravy, except that we're smearing blood in the faces of Islamic prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, making them unclean, and thus denying them their salvation. We're also wrapping prisoners in the Israeli flag and forcing them to soil themselves. Oh, and how can I forget the women interrogators who tease and touch these purported Islamofascists, again to make them unclean in the face of their god. These gems are just a few of new allegations that are leaking from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where Iraqi and Afghani rebels are held indefinitely and interrogated in non-accordance with the Geneva Convention.

I'm rather bothered by the fact that Americans hold their noses high in the face of other countries. There's nothing wrong with America having a moral compass but there's a clear double standard at work. We contend to be leaps and bounds ahead of Europe and the Middle East when it comes to values, yet we stack pyramids of nude Iraqi prisoners and take pictures. We make excuses for some of the most abominable acts in human rights history--- stuff that makes Chinese water torture look like a trip to Shipwreck Island. If those acts of torture really are comparable to “frat jokes,” I'm suddenly really, really scared of college.

Some right-wing zealots are quick to condone this behavior, pointing to the images of smoldering towers on 9-11; “they get what they deserve.” The war in Afghanistan to unseat the Taliban and al Qaeda was more than justified by any pretense of the word. Last time I checked, though, thousands of Iraqi and Taliban soldiers were dead and even more maimed. Our revenge has been had many, many times over. I would go so far to say that the revenge has even been exacted on innocent people. Maybe I could live with torturing the hijackers themselves and the higher-ups behind the terrorist attack in order to protect America, but I could never condone torturing a group of prisoners simply because they belong to the same religion and live in the same part of the world.

My favorite argument when it comes to torture, the one that makes me double-take like Daffy Duck, is “at least we're not as bad as [blank],” with the blank being filled with Nazis or the Taliban or the Iraqi insurgency. I'm sorry: America should try its darnedest to be the exact opposite of Nazis, not a notch or two below. No, we're not the Taliban: we're not beheading innocent hostages or driving car-bombs into hospitals. But on the continuum of really bad things, I'd say that renouncing someone's assumed salvation is almost as bad.

"No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” That's what the Fifth Amendment says. “Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.” That's what the Geneva Convention says. Those aren't really hard rules to follow.

Enter Alberto Gonzalez, President Bush's nominee for attorney general. Just like his predecessor, John Ashcroft, Gonzalez sees no problem in placing “terrorists” outside of the Geneva Convention's rules and regulations for prisoner treatment. Gonzalez is also very vocal about extending the rights of interrogators to a broad, almost “whatever means necessary” plan. To anyone who voted (or supported) Bush's re-election campaign, realize you may be a small part responsible for the appointment of a repackaged Dr. Joseph Mengele. You may be, with the tiniest sliver of guilt, responsible for unspeakable atrocities performed on wrongly-convicted prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

I realize that the American military has a job to do in defending this country. I also realize that the United States tries to make strides in defining and protecting the morals of its citizens. Heck, most American voters back in November made their decision based on the “moral values” of each candidate. Maybe we should step back and think about what those morals really are. Maybe, just maybe, those morals aren't all invested in one political party.

Of Black Turtlenecks and Acid-Wash Jeans

So close your eyes for a moment and picture an event that calls together two of the world's most hated bodies: uppity geeks and journalists. This event is like a yearly sermon on the mount with the Jesus of Dickdom presiding over a sea of mop-headed nerds juiced on Starbucks and donning second-hand Armani jackets on top of ironic print T-shirts. The nerds are there to praise their prophet and reaffirm their large egos through what could only be called the largest technology circle jerk know to man. And the journalists-- just like eager pornographers ready to make a buck-- are ready to chronicle this ridiculous event, water it down, and feed it to the hungry masses.

Don't know what I'm talking about?

WWDC '06

This ridiculous gathering of Mac Addicts, bloggers, foreign press, and anyone who gets off on watching Steve Jobs move his hands around is the most sickening moment of the year for me and the biggest reason that I am so anti-Apple. It's not the technology that pisses me off, nor the snazzy interfacing, but the niche factor. The fact that owning an Apple product makes people feel like they're part of some grand movement or, even worse, the hippest hipster in town makes me gag. And when you get thousands of Apple addicts in one place for one big conference, well, I'm wondering why we can't pull a Dresden firebombing on the city of San Francisco.

One of the worst things about WWDC is, in fact, the hype leading up to it. People have been masturbating for the past 360-something days about what's going to be unveiled at THIS conference. An iPod phone? A new Nano? A giant Apple vibrator? Steve Jobs could probably shit in a bag on stage and throw it at the crowd and it would be hailed as the next big thing. In essence it doesn't matter what is released because people will praise it regardless.

It says a lot about the human race, actually: that if you polish plastic correctly, you can make anything into a staple of American consumerism.

The fanaticism, the blind worship by the media: it all comes to a head at WWDC.

Worldwide Dickhead Conference