Exodus: Movement Of The Bloggers

I have to get out of here.

Soon, Blogger will stop supporting FTP publishing, which means that my little experiment with "trusting" servers I don't own will soon end in tears and I won't be able to go to the web to post these crazy little missives. If you see the little orange and white "B" next to the URL of this site, you'll note that this is a Blogger-driven website. Change is coming to me whether I like it or not.

I am less than pleased about that, especially given that I don't have much time to do anything about it. I mentioned this briefly already.

A host (pardon the pun) of alternatives present themselves, each zanier than the last. A good, good friend installed a Wordpress server on my personal domain, where I'm doing some experimentation. Here's the options I'm debating:

• Go back to plain jane HTML blogging, manually FTPing files to my domain(s), creating my own RSS feeds (pain in the butt) and writing the blogs "on the road," transferring them from plain text to the blog when I can sit down at a computer ... retiring The Hundred and Four in the process and moving all blogging operations back to the mothership on The Operative Network.
  
• Let Google shake me down on The Hundred and Four for a custom domain and suck it up (less than attractive)
• Finagle the Wordpress install my homeboy did on my domain and somehow make it look like a page that doesn't make me wanna throw up in my soul.
• Taking my year-long sabbatical from social networking a step farther into getting offline completely. However, given how therapeutic and helpful for my writing it's been to shout from the digital rafters, that seems "un-possible."

I have to make a decision by March 26th, a date that's bearing down on my wife much harder than me (more on that in a bit ... scratch that, probably just links when she's ready to make her big reveal).

What's funniest is that this happens less than a year after I finally completely relented to "blogging engines." I'd done (literally) more than a thousand posts at MySpace and still considered myself keeping the torch burning since I was maintaining my Soapbox by hand, the way spirit intended you to. I created a client site which had Blogger integrated and was like, "oh, that's not so hard" and now I'm screwed. Stupid trusting Google to not change up the game!

Playing (Music): "The Great Divide" by Vertical Horizon

These Aren't The Droids You're Looking For: Cloud Computing is Bad Weather

Let's start out with a simple, yet largely unpublicized thesis: cloud computing is bad.

Many people, even many powerful and profitable businesses would love you to believe otherwise. They assure you their shiny, distant machines can be trusted.

" ...one of us, one of us ..."

From security failures with Google Docs to Paris Hilton's hacked Sidekick (as the biggest of many Sidekick-related tragedies, without even looking at the Blackberry problems), there's ample evidence that cloud computing is "chock full of fail."

The idea seems so idyllic. Create and store your data -- documents, music, whatever -- and store it "in the cloud," on distant servers you don't own and don't control, accessing your material via the internet. The problem is that, like, say, communism, it only works in an idealized state. When real life and real people are involved ... preposterous.

Why? Well, let's look at a number of elements ...

- I CAN'T GET ONLINE: You and your co-workers have a presentation to do on Monday morning. All week you worked on it, collaborating with Google Wave and posting the results on Google Docs. You're feeling confident about your work, and on Sunday night you're gonna fulfill your responsibility to download the file so it can be prepped for a laptop and tested on a projector, since you're first up at the meeting first thing the next day. But you live in Los Angeles, and the rains were heavy as hell and knocked down a tree, which snapped wires that fed your DSL connection (true story, happened to me). You're not getting online tonight, and you can't just drive out to a cyber cafe or something because, oh, your husband is sick and can't be left alone. You are, as they say, screwed.

"... and that's how I got fired ..."

- I CAN'T TRUST YOU: Let's say your phone is, oh, I dunno, a Verizon Droid. You enter your contact information into the device, or maybe you sync it up via Gmail. That means your contacts are on a computer somewhere, available to anybody smart enough to hack into 'em. Why do you care? Well, let's say you work for, oh, I dunno, a design firm that manages the website for a defense contractor, and you talk to lots of department heads to get sign off (true story, happened to someone I worked for). Suddenly, all your contacts -- name, your notes about them, job titles, et cetera -- are a national security risk. Good job, you just encouraged Al Qaeda! You are, not to put too fine a point on it, caught out there.

- I CAN'T KEEP WHAT I PAID FOR: Let's say you own an e-reader like, let's just say an Amazon Kindle. You buy a book that you love and bought wholly legally. One day, you go look to read your book to go do a report on it and whammo, your content got remotely redacted, player! As David Pogue at the New York Times explains: "apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price." When you spent your money, you didn't buy the book, you licensed it, and that license can be revoked with or without your approval or knowledge. You are, just for kicks, anally raped.

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

Some say that moving some content (entertainment based) to float in the ethereal nothingness is a fix for a season of The Office hogging up 20GB of hard drive space, and that "most average consumers are not going to ... buy terabyte external hard drives" to keep their purchases. Really? So, if I wanna keep the stuff I buy at the store, I'm not just gonna find a place for it at home, I'd expect the store to keep giving it to me when I want it? That kind of westernized laziness saddens me deep in my soul parts.

Me? I can't buy it -- literally. For years, I was elated with my Treo 680, which allowed me seamless integration of notes and contacts with my Mac, let me do web browsing and word processing, had basics like cut and paste, but most importantly let me manage my own security. Aside from the unavoidables of SMS and voice call records, I decided what went out and what stayed. Then, on one horrible December night before the birth of my latest daughter, my Treo 680 leapt to its death out of the camera bag I use as a "utility belt" and down the cold, cruel hard wood steps of my apartment's atrium. I was crestfallen at best.

Luckily, my research had already led me to what I believe is the best phone on the market, and as soon as my financial situation slows down a little, it will be mine. Not for the technologically faint of heart, the Nokia N900 once again keeps all the data local (being largely plan agnostic helps with that) while bringing me new 3G speeds, 48GB of hard drive space (I'm happy to keep my own files, thank you very much), Linux OS capable of installing OpenOffice and a video player that handles multiple formats natively, plus oodles of other bells and whistles. I tingle just writing about it.

Let me be clear that I'm not an anti-Google person (even though I am a pro-Apple person and recognize the antagonism between the companies as Nexus One moves to compete with the iPhone). I use Google Reader every day (as is shown in the right nav here). On an everyday basis, I would not search with any other engine (sorry, Icerocket, although I do go to Ask.com for specific things I can phrase properly). Also, as you see, I not only criticize Google's cloud aspirations, but Amazon and other companies -- and if you ask me about the iPad, I'd have similar concerns about not being able to control my own machine. Google just happens to be the public's vision of a leader in the drive for cloud computing, and I feel they're going in the wrong way (even if I understand their reasons). I have to paint them all with the same brush.

When I see "a bare knuckled bucket of 'does'" ads for the Droid, I think about what it can't do -- be free from the tentacles of the cloud (and yes, that's a weird mental image, but factual). I look at the G1 or the Nexus One (and how screwy is that thing, huh?) and I shudder. Avago Technologies chief information officer Bob Rudy told the San Francisco Chronicle that "The days of owning software are coming to an end." I don't think he, or anybody else, has the right to tell me what kinds of products I can't own (unless the products are people, because that's clearly not cool) especially based on decades of consumption. I'd no more trust a Photoshop in the clouds than I'd trust public transportation to get me to work.

Which, essentially, is what's likely to happen. Those that have to will live in the cloud, because doing it my way, the safe way ("the safe way is the slow way, Muadib") is both challenging (maintaining your own security, hard for a culture weaned from personal responsibility) and expensive (the phone I want has an MSRP of -- brace yourself -- $650 with zero carrier subsidy). The continued tiering of society in a "post-racial" world. Good luck with that.

Playing (Music): "Thank You" by Lupe Fiasco off of his Enemy of the State mixtape

UPDATE: Mere hours after this blog got updated, Nokia announced that they'll be shipping Maemo 6-based smartphones in the second half of 2010. Yes, the $650 phone I want is a Maemo 5 phone. I can't wait like Nu Shooz.

UPDATE 2/5/10: Google strikes back ... *sigh*

Blog Fu: The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

"... if you ain't hip to the rare house quake, shut up, already ... damn!"

- I've been increasingly concerned about increases in the crazification factor of people wandering around in what I indulgently will refer to as "western society." I've read recently about a 23-year-old pregnant woman found dead with (hang on) the baby cut out of her stomach.

Then there's the Texas death row inmate convicted of stabbing his wife and baby to death, ripping their hearts out, and while waiting for his first trial (brace yourself) plucking out his own right eye and eating it before being considered "clearly 'crazy,' but he is also 'sane' under Texas law," or so Judge Cathy Cochran wrote in a 14-page statement accompanying the court's brief order. Worst of all, he was Black. Like we needed that on our tally ...

Speaking of Texas, don't forget the woman who dismembered her newborn baby with a knife and two swords (wouldn't expect a baby to put up that much of a fight) before eating parts of his body and brain before failing to kill herself.

Oddly enough, the one that bothered me the most is the 51-year-old mother who took her teenaged son hiking, waited until he was looking at scenery and then shot him to death, first in the head and then in the chest before eating a bullet herself. This after methodically disposing of a family pet, calmly buying the gun and composing a lengthy suicide note ... that gave no reason why the boy had to die.

Now, anybody who's ever read my work can attest to the fact that I have no overly sentimental attachment to life, human or otherwise. Death happens. I don't think it's a big deal. I once told someone that the only crime I couldn't get my brain around was rape. Theft, sure, all day, makes sense, get yours. Murder? Well, yeah, there are times I can see people considering that the best choice. But these killings ... I don't get it. I'm nowhere near crazy enough to see the line of thinking that leads to these behaviors. Moreover, with the eye guy (who looks strangely like he could be related to Chris Brown, IMNSHO), the amount of focus you have to have to block out the make-you-pass-out levels of pain from plucking out your own eye, and then staying conscious through the shock and bleeding long enough to eat it ... that's the stuff of nightmares, in my mind. All this "oh, some people got shot" or "she ran them down with her car" stuff is pansy by comparison. I can't even write stuff this bananas. So that's been haunting me for a few days ...

- At least they didn't have sex with a horse ... repeatedly.

- In completely unrelated news, UCLA will no longer allow the three-times-a-year Undie Run. This "tradition" started after I was long done with college, and involved the students of Cal State Westwood to boot, so I'd never even gotten close to it. But it seemed like a fun and largely harmless thing (what's a few arrests, assaults and a burglary between friends?), so I'm almost sad to see it go in that it makes the city marginally less whimsical.

- Back to people getting killed, this at least made me laugh like a silly bastard: Cracked's Five Real Life Soldiers Who Make Rambo Look Like a P***y. The Finnish sniper was fantastic, but the 19-year-old Yogreva Singh Yadav and US candidates Alvin York and Audie Murphy just made me giggle like a schoolgirl on E. All the fancy training, all the skills one can amass, and the second you find somebody who wants it more and catches you at the right time, boom, you're in a bag. Ask those Soviet or Pakistani or German soldiers. Hilarity.

- Apparently, due to science and da intanet and what have you, women are getting statistically more beautiful in the US while men remain pretty much as we always were. Yeah, okay. I've got no argument there.

- How cool is the idea of transparent aluminum? Aside from the idea of a wrap you can cook in and see through, it apparently "created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before," said Oxford University Department of Physics Professor Justin Wark. "Transparent aluminium is just the start. The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of 'miniature stars' created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth." Now that's cool.

- I don't need to go into the Skip Gates thing -- I've long said Yankee Black folk are way too comfortable with their fancy "freedom," and need to be more strategic. No, I'm more bothered by the Nuttworld case where a Black man got hit in the face by a piece of wood-wielding white guy on a Bay Area street, and the eyewitness didn't think to report it. Plus le change, plus le meme chose, fool.

- I am bothered, however, by how often I have to tell Black people that the great pyramids were not and could not have been built by slaves. Let alone that the only large influx of people into dynastic Egypt (Kemet) were not poor desert wanderers looking for freedom, but bloodthirsty invaders, so quash that theory as well. From non-Black people, this seems fairly predictable in a sad, mass-media-and-Charlton-Heston-influenced way. From Black people? It's a tragedy, IMNSHO, to have so little regard for your own roots. Admittedly, this was an area of fairly intensive study for me, but still ...

- Speaking of Africa, I'm consistently bothered by the fact that the continent is apparently connected to the net via an extension cord looped through the Nigerian equivalent of Pookie's back window, especially because of how often it stops working. I need to find out what's at the "good" end of that cable, and it's hard to do since the official site looks like it was coded in 1997. Oy.

- Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not really out to get you. A military coup planned by Dubya's granddad? Scientologists raiding the IRS? Explosion-proof Hitler? Cracked also noted seven insane conspiracies that actually happened including the tragic fate of Guy Fawkes (one day, I wanna write an alternative history story where he succeeded).

- Foxes in Germany steal shoes -- pass it on.

- To celebrate his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, please enjoy the wit and wisdom of Rickey Henderson.

- I need to check out Street Sweeper Social Club, which is made up of Rage Against The Machine's Tom Morello and the illustrious and praiseworthy leader of The Coup, Boots Riley. There's also a new free song for download I wanna check out from Goapele.

- I guess this and this mean I'm never gonna get the $200 I was owed from that Luniz review I did while Jesse Washington was editor.

- I love taking a nap.

- To be honest, I don't have a lot of the so-called 100 Essential Skills for Geeks ... but I know some people who do. Those people are extraordinarily useful to know.

That's more than enough for now, and my blog-fu file still has literally hundreds of links. Whee!

Playing (Music): "Cornbread" by Freestyle Fellowship

Blog Fu: Iron Monkey

The Hundred and Four* will, among many other purposes, serve as an information clearinghouse. The ancient art of blog-fu helps with that, practiced by many but mastered by few, and which I practiced for years aggregating content for CBR's Comic Reel column (now run by the illustrious and praiseworthy Erik Amaya, who I did my best to train in the Sith ways).

Let us begin with a quote from the brilliant but cancelled TV show Kings (much beloved of Entertainment Weekly's Marc Bernardin)** ...

Jessie Shepherd: "People with destinies, things don't go well for them. They die old and unhappy, or young and unfinished."

Are you sitting comfortably? Good, then I'll begin:

- Let's start with some news about living in the future. Like what? How about a computer that can read lips, which is a wonderful advance for all the Big Brother/Dick Cheney wet dreams of capturing information that wants to be free?

Not far enough for you? How about scientists creating a star right here on earth? Yes, that sounds outlandishly unsafe, but that's probably part of the appeal. Kind of a Venkman and Spengler sort of thing, doncha think?***

Why there's even practice for a mission to Mars, because so many of us are desperate to get away from this potentially godforsaken rock that people are lining up to take a ride even close to space? Perhaps they can see the writing on the wall about how it will all end**** and are trying to plan ahead like a macro-scale game of Civilization 2. Hard to say.

- Let's move on. Remember Friendster? Few people do.***** The numbers seem to indicate that MySpace is learning some hard lessons about obsolescence. Sure, 70 million users is far from chicken feed, but trends being what they are ... in my own limited experience, I'm seeing more young people return to or adhere to MySpace (judging from the customers at bars where I host karaoke -- more on that in a bit******) whereas more adults in their late 20s and onwards are Facebooking it up. Twitter? It plays by no rules I've seen (with its tools for power users, artists using it as an alternative revenue stream and even ways to share music, plus everybody knows I love Twitpic), and in my own idiosyncratic experiences, has kept the annoying outages to a dull roar.

Anyway, Rupert Murdoch-powered MySpace soon afterwards announced a big staffing cut, which makes MySpace look like a wounded elephant. Only important because our virtual homes are becoming more of where we spend our lives and interact, so looking at the management becomes relevant for a grasp of the zeitgeist. Developing ...

- Speaking of battling multi-million dollar companies, Google is ready to get into the OS game and Micro$oft strikes back with a web-based, free Office option. Whaaaat? It's all true.

Google's hippie PR and egalitarian image belies a corporate juggernaut, but one far less obvious and mean-spirited in its rapaciousness than the rowdies in Redmond. As a lifelong Mac evangelist*******, any attack on the House that Gates Built, Stole and Oppressed His Way Into******** gets a cheer from me, and this fight is a battle for the way people think digitally, so it's surely worth keeping an eye on.

- Fnord.

- What else is up? Well, of course that Philadelphia swimming pool incident proved that, Obama or not, plus le change, plus le meme chose (or as Talib Kweli once said, "conditions in the hood don't change with the president"). Racism? Discrimination? Prejudice? Alive and well even far from the fields of Dixie. One has to look no farther than the Inglewood police department (which, fun fact, is in a predominantly Black city, ha ha, funny old life) to see that in action every single day. Thanks to Boston's Dart Adams for the heads up on that.

- Don't think about escaping into music, pal. Not when those bastards at the RIAA wanna fine a 32-year-old single mother eighty thousand dollars a song for downloading. What's the total on that? Brace yourself -- one point nine two millon US freaking dollars. That had to be typed out so it'd be clear that the number of zeroes wasn't a typo. On a daily basis, you can see LAPD cops running red lights sans sirens or not using hands free devices to speak on cell phones as they drive. But they have more guns than you. Bend over and relax your muscles, it's easier that way.

- To quote the erstwhile Blade, "bu-bu-bu-but wait, it gets worse!" In "fan fiction goes horribly, horribly wrong" news, Eli Stone visionary and Green Lantern scriptwriter Marc Guggenheim is -- wait for it -- writing a new comic book for Dynamite Entertainment -- brace yourself -- based on Galactica 1980.

Get up off the floor. Yes, you read that correctly. This is really happening. Yes, someone thinks this is a good idea. Spirit help us all, yes, someone will probably buy this. What's next, a comic book adaptation of Hell Comes to Frogtown by Robert Kirkman? Listen, people -- some things just need to die. I know we all love the nostalgia wave ... well, some of us. Anyway, some things don't need to come back.

If Guggenheim creates a work of such awe-inspiring wonder that Eisner Awards will cloud around it like a butterfly crown,********* I will let Marc Guggenheim punch me in the stomach. Chances are, this is a catastrophically bad idea, even in the hands of a writer as skilled as this one. Oy.

- "Damn, Hannibal, you're awfully negative!" Actually, no I'm not. I have a beautiful pregnant wife and an adorable, brilliant stepdaughter. I have a job where I make good money and I'm good at it. I even recently closed a deal to bring one of my novels to life as a comic book and possibly an animated project as well. Despite a lot more gray hairs than I ever expected and quite possibly being clinically insane, I am essentially fine and dandy.********** The rest of you seem to be almost irreparably f***ed up. Don't blame me as I hold up a mirror to your lunacy.

How do I illustrate the new wonder of me, the one that makes so many so sick to see me so fly that NASA calls me for directions? I do it by sharing love, with all of you. How do I do that? With karaoke Skeletor drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon (thanks to Robot 6 for that one). I give you the opposite of gangsta. With you I share the statistics of red shirts, give you a peek at the awesomeness of a Death Star grill and let you know about the world's largest air sex competition.

I'm a giver. It's not my fault so many of you are cuckoo for crack-o-puffs.

In the end, who should you blame? I believe this*********** closes the book on that discussion.

Behave.

Or else.

FOOTNOTES:

* = Yes, I will bold the name everywhere. That's consistency of style. Learn it, live it, love it.

** = It's kind of scary how gay he is for that show.

*** = Yes, Ghostbusters 3 is happening, and you probably can't do anything to stop it. I'm sorry. Well, I would be, if I cared. Maybe.

**** = Would you have preferred accelerated heat death instead?

***** = Go on, Google "love" and "friendster." It's sad.

****** = Maybe not today. Maybe not even on this blog. But soon.

******* = My 15" Macbook Pro is called, by virtually everyone who knows it, "the precious."

******** = Please don't forget that the entire Windows OS is stolen from an early build of Mac OS, and then bloatwared to death. After Microsoft Word 5.1, that company hasn't done a single thing right.

********* = Like that call back to Kings? That's how you do it. However, whenever I see the show, I think in my brain, "have you ever seen a kingdom with a butter fly crown? Rulin' is a habit, get like me ..." Hm ... maybe I shouldn't tell people these things.

********** = Si se puede. Universal paradigm shift. Choose joy. Patent pending.

*********** = Anedge hirak Michael Joseph Jackson.