Disqus - Latest Comments for exador23

Re: 7 little-known tricks to beat the heat

exador23 — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 15:52:20 -0000

really? put a sheet in the fridge? sheets have no thermal mass. they'll reach room temp by the time you flip them onto the bed.

Re: US crime rate at lowest point in decades. Why America is safer now. - CSMonitor.com

exador23 — Thu, 03 May 2012 18:59:28 -0000

I'm disappointed that a major factor was left out: The reduction of lead in the environment, which is likely responsible for 50% or more of the drop in crime levels http://www.wired.com/wireds...

Re: Open Letter to Occupy Wall Street #OWS

exador23 — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 18:15:02 -0000

...That is to say, there is significant overlap between those who took to the streets to protest that police atrocity in Oakland and those who occupied public space a few months later and called their square Oscar Grant Plaza. Those faces are of every color and dominated by no color. Similarly, there was a large multi-racial action to try and save Troy Davis. The Occupy Movement began on 17 September. There were many Troy Davis signs carried (again by people of all colors) on that day, despite full knowledge that by holding those signs the media would claim there was no "unified message."

The problems we face are tremendous, and we're 30-40 years behind. It was a long, deep sleep. The corporate media sedative was strong. It's formula included little knowledge of the abuses Black Canseco speaks of except for those of us with broader news sources or life situations or in cases of abuses caught on video like the beating of Rodney King. Those of us outraged by systemic abuses have been frustrated by our sleeping neighbors, and the lack of a cohesive movement or forum to address them. And by an economic system that relies on divide and conquer techniques - encouraging us to be happy with our own lot in life, by blaming The Other for taking jobs (the ones no-one else wants) or for scholarships with a preference towards minorities (when the problem is declining funds for education).

To use the old tool of racial tension to scold Occupy Wall Street for ignoring abuses that took place before they formed is quite unproductive. I could similarly scold the african american community for sitting down today to celebrate Thanksgiving - a holiday initially declared in celebration of the slaughter of 700 native americans gathered in gratitude of their harvest - the women and children burnt alive. This kicked off a frenzy of similar massacres each followed by a "Thanksgiving" until George Washington convinced everyone to only celebrate it once a year and later Abraham Lincoln made it a national holiday. A celebration of centuries of systematic genocide and theft of resources which continues to this day as children are taken from reservations to fuel a for-profit private foster care system in South Dakota. Yes, each of us has been guilty of not being informed or speaking out.

I've been to Occupy LA many times. I see a complete cross-section of participation across racial, gender, and age divisions representative of the diversity of our city. At the General Assemblies, they are constantly encouraging participation by women and minorities in various committees, especially the facilitation committee which through their neutral but prominent role can appear to the untrained eye to be "leadership." While the complaints leveled against OWS are justified if leveled toward the American Culture in general, I do not see them as justified with regard to the movement in Los Angeles. I can't speak for other cities but I can guarantee that the best chance we have of healing any of societies wounds right now is to participate yourself. let your story be heard. and listen to the stories of your fellow beings. connect and speak out together. let's stop playing the games that got us here.

p.s. try #occupythehood and #occupypolice.

Re: Open Letter to Occupy Wall Street #OWS

exador23 — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 04:25:39 -0000

Oscar Grant.

Re: Herman Cain Seems To Reveal That He Was Unaware Of China’s Nuclear Capability

exador23 — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:55:30 -0000

Very good points, sir. I'm quite aware of the realities of these various wars that have been draining our treasury for decades. It was a mistake to conflate the overarching Domino Theory and the ideological War on Communism with more specific "proxy wars" with China alone for the sake of brevity.

I am also aware of my oversimplification of Neoconservatism. I only included that because vbscript2's comment up above asserting that there is "no such movement," and suggesting that it's merely a pejorative used by one "side." This was not directed at you, and I'm pleased to hear you're knowledgeable about (and against) their insidious effort to keep the US in a constant state of war. This is Cain's foreign policy team http://thecable.foreignpoli... I'm not going to waste my time investigating them unless Cain gets the nomination, but ties to Rumsfeld did raise an eyebrow.

I too am against character assassination attempts. I could care less about Cain's bedroom tactics, or Clinton's or Weiner's or any other politician's unless they expose hypocrisy like Phil Hinkle or Larry Craig - because the culture of politicians who pass laws they don't feel apply to them is one of the core problems of this country. None of the politicians who are against government health care have turned down their own excellent government health care for example.

The biggest problem with our country right now, however, is this culture of Politics as Competitive Sport, and that's what spurred me to reply. When Obama rejected Free Market principles by agreeing to NOT negotiate medicare drug prices, where was the outcry from Team GOP or its fans? That's something both "sides" could have agreed on. Over the next few months individual elements of the dead Jobs Bill will come before Congress. Even the various conservative proposals will be rejected along purely party lines because our reps are not interested in fixing problems, they are interested only in winning, and we, the fans continue to cheer them on regardless of the suffering it is causing.

Re: Herman Cain Seems To Reveal That He Was Unaware Of China’s Nuclear Capability

exador23 — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 04:13:42 -0000

It's not about "sides." This isn't the Superbowl. We are deciding who will be the Commander in Chief of the deadliest military in the world. A major dynamic of the Cold War was a nuclear-capable China. This led to proxy wars like The Korean War, The Vietnam War and Afghanistan, where President Reagan funded the Taliban "Freedom Fighters" at the behest of the Neoconservative advisors who had his ears. [Neoconservatism is school of political thought wherein capitalist-based democracy should be spread by any means necessary - no, it has never gone away, and was very prominent in leading to the Iraq War based on incorrect "intelligence"]

I want the President to know the nuclear status of a country when he receives that 3am call about an international incident and needs to decide upon a response.

Re: Working it out in public: What’s my problem with #OccupyWallStreet?

exador23 — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:10:05 -0000

Just sharing this piece by Douglas Rushkoff because it expresses what I was trying to add to the conversation much better than I could :) http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/...

Re: Working it out in public: What’s my problem with #OccupyWallStreet?

exador23 — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:10:20 -0000

I've looked over the various websites and statements affiliated with the protests. I haven't seen anything that troubles me or suggests they're seeking to overthrow the government. to the contrary, they seem rather committed to non-violence. And the primary goal seems to be reigning in corporations and their influence on government. You're certainly welcome to have reservations, but i'm not seeing anything nefarious, destabilizing, or exclusive about this. And I am seeing people who ordinarily shy away from politics becoming interested in it. The wisconsin protests had some rather specific demands, and it just fizzled away when they were ignored.

Re: Working it out in public: What’s my problem with #OccupyWallStreet?

exador23 — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 19:06:33 -0000

"The 99%" is hardly exclusive. I see it as an attempt to inspire those who have suffered under 3 decades of "trickle down" economics that never reached them to tell their stories. it's much harder for ideological myths regarding unemployment and laziness and the like to maintain sway over those in the 99% who still believe that they are magically going to make it to the 1% if they pray or work hard enough when confronted with stories they can relate to. As such, I suspect this movement has real potential to eventually start crossing the hardened political party lines we've become accustomed to. Before the Tea Party was completely astroturfed, there was a lot of anger towards bank and wall street bailouts, which might eventually be re-ignited. (i.e. I find it interesting that most of the inappropriate police actions were carried out by the white shirts rather than the blue ones, who know their pensions and union benefits are more precarious)

If the protests had more specific political demands at this point in time, it would probably become less inclusive, and play into popular political myths and divisiveness rather than attempt to go beyond them.

Re: Scripting News: Random Tuesday observations

exador23 — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 19:36:31 -0000

Silos are a frustrating feature of the web. I'm personally grateful to all the coders who keep doing great things to tear down the walls, especially those involved in open protocols and federation...

The combination of OStatus and the newly implemented Mirrored Feeds feature means I can get Tumblr, Buzz, and other blogs that use elements of the OStatus open protocol bundle right in my single user status.net stream. This now includes RSS feeds (I haven't tried it out yet, though.) If you sign up for single user account a la exador.status.net/all or run your own federated instance, you can choose the character count you want to limit yourself to. posts which exceed a federated instance's limit are truncated with an ellipses which if clicked expands to include the full post right in your stream, solving the char count incompatibility issue.

Progress worth checking out if you haven't looked in on identi.ca and status.net lately.

Re: How Twitter can save itself from Doom. (Scripting News)

exador23 — Sat, 01 May 2010 12:52:53 -0000

it's kind of amazing to me that while all this talk of what twitter needs to do is going on, status.net is out there solving these problems in the real world with OStatus http://status.net/2010/03/0... ~seemingly~ without any knowledge of it by the technorati.

Federation works - not in theory, in practice. There are something like 20,000 statusnet instances and growing, including the hot property http://shitmydadsays.com. It's open-source, yet there's a business model in-place, complete with enterprise solutions, status.net cloud hosting, etc. I doubt you'll ever see sponsored posts inserted into your stream there. The rate of innovation far outstrips Twitter, and there has been no feature "freeze." Quite the contrary: there are now groups. you can subscribe to groups on other servers remotely, receive posts from them, add posts to them, and reply - all almost as if they were on the same server. Replies are elegantly threaded. You can subscribe to tumblr blogs, buzz accounts, cliqset, some wordpress blogs and more (the list grows daily) and see them right in your stream. The namespace issue is already resolved. I can @userx@gmail.com or @usery@identi.ca from @exador23@exador.status.net (yes, my own single-user cloud hosted instance). Of course, if you're already subscribed to those users and there's no name conflict, you don't need the cumbersome addressing. similarly, if you just hit [reply] to a post you receive from, say, a group you're subbed to from a user you're not, again, it gets delivered (not just to their replies tab, but directly to their stream as a real-time service should.)

The 140 issue is resolved too. Each federated instance can choose it's own limit from 1c to unlimited. My 420 character messages arrive on the 140c identi.ca truncated with an ellipses that is expanded in stream if they wish to see the whole thing. it's delivered to the !group or #hashtag even if the tag is after the truncation. And lengthy buzz or tumblr posts arrive in my stream with the same expandable truncation. After all, what business can make full use of an enterprise microblogging communication service if it's limited to 140c?

The list goes on. you can interface via xmpp or email, and soon via various IM clients. two-way bridging to twitter is possible. etc. etc. It's not perfect, but no moss is growing. I don't know when folks last explored statusnet - i suspect for many it was when the software was still called laconica, and back around 0.5 - 0.7. They just released version 0.9.2. It seems to me, the web would be better served by people helping to flesh out the OStatus standard and/or implement the standards it uses like Salmon rather than tilting at the hopelessly closed Twitter windmill all the time, while continuing to feed them your content.

Merely a happy power user (not even a techie one)
-steve.

Re: Scripting News: How big is a nugget-of-news?

exador23 — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 09:35:49 -0000

you might be interested in this study of sentence lengths http://ds.nahoo.net/Academi...

An average sentence is 148.8 characters ~before adding any punctuation~. if you want a #hashtag and a http://tinyurl.com/xxxx and a @username for a reply or attribution (42c just for the generic example), and you'd need a 190 character limit just to have a single coherent sentence. 140c is dumbing down conversation. technology should allow for at least the 80% point of an intelligent sentence, not the 20% point twitter has chosen.

"Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things." ~ Marshall McLuhan - Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972) [217c/283c with attribution]

Re: Hillary for VP, redux

exador23 — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:15:39 -0000

wow. you're actually suggesting that Dennis Kucinich is more interested in stopping a woman's choice than furthering the cause of a health care proposal he's fought for for years?

meanwhile if someone were to suggest that Obama was more interested in making sure the insurance or pharmaceutical companies don't get in the way of his re-election than in negotiating drug prices as promised, or having all negotiations be in the open as promised, or be open to proposals from all sides as recently promised, you brush them off as counterproductive, idealistic, etc. etc. etc. ugh.

Re: Hillary for VP, redux

exador23 — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:32:12 -0000

as it stands, provisions for allowing states to implement single payer, if they desire, don't take effect until 2017, and the law would allow insurance companies to sue any state that tried. fix that and you might be able to woo his vote.

Kucinich didn't hide his position when he ran for his seat (or the presidency). His constituents voted for his position on the issues. If President Obama had the same moral fortitude and follow-thru in what he told us when he was a candidate, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now. to suggest that kucinich, by holding to ~his~ campaign promises, is ignoring his constituents or giving america the middle finger is not only wrong, but counterproductive to the goal of having a functional government that we can trust, rather than a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate interests.

Re: Hillary for VP, redux

exador23 — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:33:40 -0000

I assume you're making the connection that because stupak is an ass, if kucinich remains true to his stance, congress will bend to the will of the anti-abortionists rather than giving serious consideration to his position. and that's his fault, how?

Re: Hillary for VP, redux

exador23 — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:12:48 -0000

Kucinich is in this for what he honestly believes to be the best thing for the american people. He's not after a sweetheart deal for his state. If he is grandstanding (and I don't believe he is), it's only to make certain single-payer gets a voice after close to a year of so many saying, "that's the better solution, but it's impossible." [thank god that sentiment wasn't prevalent when JFK said we needed to put a man on the moon]. Everyone knows what Obama said during the state of the union address about listening to all proposals. It's also clear that that hasn't been the case.

the senate bill was watered down and watered down to serve the narrow interests of all manner of conservatives who will not vote for it anyway. Here's a congressman whose position on healthcare has remained consistent. Here's a congressman who has authored alternatives and amendments instead of just saying no to gain political points or a sweetheart deal for his state. Here's a congressman whose spine could achieve a better bill. We need more like him, not attacks on him.

Consider if the solution being proposed for our environmental, oil dependency, and energy problems were to require everyone to buy a hybrid, and all hybrid car manufacturers were already making obscene profits and all their offerings in the marketplace had the same issues Toyota has. This is, in a nutshell, what the Senate is suggesting for healthcare. Opposing such a solution is not the evil it's made out to be.

Re: louisgray.com: OpenMicroBlogger Shows Steady Growth in First Month

exador23 — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 02:10:21 -0000

true. I was just initially shocked to see that graph, and the text of the post, until I figured out these were fresh comments on an old post. :) I think it's great that there are some OMB alternatives to laconica. the real prize is some sort of open microblogging protocol adopted among all services including twitter.

Re: louisgray.com: OpenMicroBlogger Shows Steady Growth in First Month

exador23 — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:01:35 -0000

It should be noted that this post is from September 2008, a couple months after identica opened it's doors to a massive namespace grab & people trying out the latest social media thang. After the initial drop, compete.com shows steady monthly growth of 11% and identica will probably hit the 1 Billion posts milestone within a month or so.It is currently at nearly 100,000 unique visitors: http://siteanalytics.compet...

Re: Understanding the Root of #AmazonFail

exador23 — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:23:51 -0000

Interesting article, and comments. I await further data and further explanations from Amazon... Yet I view this as a cautionary tale. Several things have stood out from the beginning:

-- Amazon has a history of decent relations with GLBT authors & books, which begs the question: What or who changed?

-- The tilt in "adult" categorization towards GLBT while leaving a variety of other materials that could be considered objectionable untouched. Companies tend to institute policies that are across-the-board. This would be more plausibly an intentional new Amazon policy if all those other books were getting the same treatment. That doesn't rule out the possibility they simply started w/GLBT books, though.

-- The timing. Most companies don't roll out new policy changes during a weekend, especially a holiday weekend, when staffing is at a minimum. When you consider the implied moral overtones of the policy, the idea that they made their staff work during a ~religious~ holiday to reduce the visibility of a whole bunch of their stock, and thus reduce their potential income, simply doesn't add up.

Re: Why am I pimping FriendFeed?

exador23 — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:40:15 -0000

I've checked it out, but the Friendfeed barrier remains: Unintuitive interface. To get any real value requires a lot of work that I'm not prepared to invest. Thanks for the update though.

--oops never mind... wasn't on the beta version, just the streaming version. looking better... FOAF import?

Re: There must be some way out of here (Scripting News)

exador23 — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:05:18 -0000

How coincidental! I'm an interconnected fault-tolerant network of synapses!

Re: New features!

exador23 — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:39:30 -0000

Nice job guys! Question: Is imgfave still Laconica-based? If so, which version?

Re: Why Identi.ca is important

exador23 — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 18:59:04 -0000

sorry for the delay in getting back to you. thanks! egg-chair philosopher sums it up best (remember those?) here's an out-of-date bio: http://ur1.ca/58

out of date because I no longer live in the Argosy, and the landscaping biz has been a little sporadic. pattern literacy is a permaculture concept http://patternliteracy.com/...

where are you located?

Re: Why Identi.ca is important

exador23 — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 20:37:49 -0000

Amen Edd. Check out a major difference between Twitter & Identi.ca: http://twitpic.com/348r/full

This is the kind of transparency we've ~Begged for~... begging that resulted in ~blogs~ of meaningless talk about load balancers and database failures. That's politician-speak. Here's a man who stayed up all night tweaking things, responding to questions, and letting everyone know what he was doing.... You know, the PURPOSE of micro-blogging.

"What are you doing?" It's the question that lured me to Twitter. Ironically it's the question we've been asking of Twitter for aeons. and we're still waiting for an answer. To me, it looks like @evan has an answer, and has given you the software to create your own answer if you don't like his.

@evan makes full use of the service he's created and ~gifted~ to the world through Open Source. Take a look at @Ev's "with others" Twitter timeline http://twitter.com/ev *** and compare it to @evan's http://hewitt.controlezvous.... Up to date information about what he's doing! sometimes even why, and what to expect. That's decidedly NOT "just like twitter" - that's working towards "winning" by allowing every user to contribute and be a part of a collective WIN.

My money is on ~social~ venture capital investments in identi.ca FTW.
Money alone isn't going to unbeach a bloated fail whale.

peace,
http://identi.ca/exador23

The journey is more important than the destination - it's where the course corrections happen.

***Oh right, they took that feature away - I guess insight into what kinds of information a person is swimming in is of no use. Who would want to know that before deciding to follow? Who would find "with others" a great way to discover new people to add to your social network? Who would want to see what might have triggered that strange post from a friend or see the full context of a conversation?

Re: Why Identi.ca is important

exador23 — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:02:05 -0000

I actually think micro-blogging ~is~ revolutionary. It is a brand new "sixth sense" of sorts.

Each of us sees/feels/experiences a small piece of the world, accompanied in most people by a robust internal chatter. It is that internal chatter that forms the basis of our daily decisions.

Micro-blogging connects all these little sensed pieces of experience in near real-time. The important elements of our internal dialogue "bubble up" as posts, and give a sense of the world as each of us experiences it. Yes, much of it is inane, just as much of our internal dialogue is. But it gives us a human sense of others and their problems. I follow a conservative representative, progressive feminine bloggers, conspiracy nuts, a farmer in Iowa, and people in India, Australia, the Netherlands... I could go on. My world is richer for it, but more importantly, tolerance, understanding, & even compassion for those ~thought~ to be different is growing (if ever so subtly.)

Most of the time, this idle chatter is about simple, perhaps unimportant things, and it's constrained to a relatively small network. But when something important (or really interesting) happens, it bubbles up, then ripples through networks so fast that if, say, a major earthquake happens or a journalist is arrested, the whole network can learn of it in a matter of minutes. How is that not revolutionary? When have we ever had a technology/protocol able to achieve that?

Prior technologies have allowed that only for limited numbers of people, and so we've needed to have representatives to fulfill the global sensing, communication, & decision-making tasks of the world. Governments will never go away, but now we have access to more information, more quickly than our leaders. And we can talk about that information ourselves, and large numbers of people can decide to do what they can to fix the problem or convince others to. (Just like with Open Source Software)

Like any tool, it comes down to how you wield it. So perhaps I should rephrase the thesis: Micro-blogging has the ~potential~ to be every bit as significant as the printing press (I'm sure it also had nay-sayers).

I'm hyper-excited about identi.ca because it brings a missing ingredient to the mix: Complaining gets you nowhere. If you aren't happy with something, FIX IT! Write a script like http://identi.ca/4fthawaiian. Host the Laconica software on your server. Write some code, or convince someone who can that it's for the greater good. And be patient. If YOU can't fix it today, why should THEY? Open Source + Micro-blogging = there is no more "they." It's you and I. If WE care about it and if WE have the skills, then WE can fix our problems quicker, better, and more humanely than any centralized hierarchy. That's why Twitter should be shaking in their boots.

Peace,
http://identi.ca/exador23
global identican

"The medium is the message" - Marshall McLuhan