And Then I Woke Up

I think about technology all the time. I think about how much it has taken over every facet of my life in a short period of time and I now try to spend weekends offline away from screens. I think about how I am part of the first digital test generation who grew up with computers in their home.

When I was about twelve I convinced my Mother to get the first Atari 400. My Father thought it was a fad. Perhaps he was right after thirty years, as technology has finally become a fashion accessory.

My friends all got them too and before long we were obsessed with gaming and programming. We would spend hours, even days locked away in suburban basements and rec-rooms staring at screens. We would trade the latest software. Some kids became experts at piracy in their curtain closed bedrooms. All piracy was offline. This was at the advent of 300 baud modems with acoustic couplers that you attached to your phone. This got you to an online bulletin board that was only text. The computers had no drives built into them. There were clunky tape drives or disc drives for storage.

I look back at this time and think about how seduced we all were. I also realize how patient we were. I’ve gone back to these computers and games and discovered how incredibly tedious they were; so brutally un-adaptive compared to now.

I wonder if there is now a certain saturation point or a distinctive timeframe where you eventually become exhausted of a screen. Is this point part of your advancing age or is it finite. Perhaps after 10,0000 hours of staring at a screen in your life, it becomes confining. If you conservatively looked a screen for an average of 4 hours a day over thirty years, it would be something approaching 5 years of your life.

When you are twelve you do not think about the future. You do not think about results and implications. You don’t think about reality all that much. Recently I cannot get my head around the idea of how commonplace digital technology has become over security. How kids have no sense of their own privacy and enjoy putting their lives online for the sake of marketers and corporations. They don’t see the corporations because they are so influenced by their peers. Their comfort zone is the screen.

The dark side of pervasive computing is that you don’t see where your data is going. You don’t think about it like when you were twelve. It’s perfect collectivism. Facebook is an awesome conformist tool. Any Fascist regime or Dictatorship from history would have loved Facebook as long as they had the keys to the backdoor.

Cracks in the walls of cyber-security mostly stem from social engineering or humans who give out information recklessly. If you are twenty-five and working for a major corporation or a bank is your default to share everything or do you have to be reminded to not give out secret knowledge? A curious problem is coming to a head. We have lost all respect for information. It’s our downfall. We are all eternally twelve.

- X.F. Pine

The Best Animal Cams

This site is all about collisions of one kind or another. I felt a need to post these as we live in a time where technology is in full collision with the natural world. I am reminded that these documents could never have been done at any other time in history.

This is from the BBC show Animal Camera. Beautiful Golden Eagle:

The Peregrine Falcon & Gos Hawk flies through the Woods:

What a Lion sees at Night:

History of the Crittercam. Great underwater compilation of Seals. Sharks and Whales. Underwater there is no way to transmit a signal, so they have to record it and eject it to the surface for recovery:

A tree Kangaroo from New Guinea with cool claws:

Finally, a great found photo story with a sea turtle. A camera washed up on a beach in Key West, Florida after being lost six months before in Aruba. This was on it.

Fond Memories of a Virus

Just dug this up. I started getting the sircam virus in my email way back in 2001. For people who do not know the mechanisms of the virus look here. It would copy information from the “my documents” folder on any Windows 98 os machine, and send it randomly to people within that person’s outlook address book. It would mask the file, with a corrupted name, and include this message. (Hi! How are you? This is the file with the information that you ask for See you later. Thanks).

When I pulled the corrupt document down on a mac to examine it, (Never try and do this on a PC running Windows) changed the extension to a .doc, and opened in MS Word as a unformatted text file I got the following messages within hundreds of pages of noise.

There is absolutely no pattern as these messages were sent without the owner’s knowledge and were organized and distributed by a unthinking virus. I started enjoying the complete randomness of the messages after a while. I have excerpted them, and do not know any of the owners.

1. This fragment appeared to be some kind of document about dentistry in Spanish. It was translated (loosely) by babelfish from Spanish.

ERUPTION. – It is the movement from the weaves that surround it until the buccal cavity, is vertical, begins within the bone to maxilar. It initiates – when already the crown of the tooth has formed, when it has matured the enamel and when formaciÛn of raÌz begins. It is classified: – preclÌnica ErupciÛn: it is the heave of the tooth within the bone to maxilar. – clÌnica ErupciÛn: it is the heave of the tooth in the buccal cavity. The speed of the heave depends on the resistance of the weaves that surround to the tooth, when clÌnica phase arrives at wing, no longer is it and its movement is but r·pido and returns to be slow when there is contact with the antagonist. Active ErupciÛn: heave in the clÌnica phase and does not finish when it finds the antagonist. Within the preclÌnica phase there is a heave within the bone to maxilar towards the buccal cavity, this movement finds resistance in the weaves that surround the tooth. In the clÌnica phase there is another heave that receives the name of erupciÛn activates Èste movement initiates since part of the tooth in the buccal cavity is seen until it finds his antagonistic

2. Cannot figure out what language this is. Turkish perhaps. It appears to be about photography.

B a g i a n F o t o – F o t o i l u s t r a s i y a n g t u r u n k e B a g . D e s a i n d i h a r a p k a n f o t o f i n a l y a n g s u d a h d i s e p a k a t i d e n g a n R e d p e l s e t i a p r u b r i k . S e h i n g g a t i d a k a d a p e r u b a h a n – p e r u b a h a n d i t e n g a h j a l a n . – F o t o s u a s a n a u n t u k i s i r u b r i k h e n d a k n y a b e r i m a g e s i z e m i n i m a l b e r u k u r a n 1 4 X 1 0 c m d e n g a n r e s o l u s i m i n i m a l 1 5 0 . U n t u k f o t o l e a d F O R U T , W a w a n c a r a , F O K U S , P r o f i l , h e n d a k n y a l e b i h b e s a r d a r i u k u r a n t e r s e b u t ( k i r a – k i r a m i n i m a l s e l e b a r 2 2 c m d e n g a n r e s o l u s i 2 0 0 ) . U n t u k k o l o m a t a u l o g o d a p a t m e n y e s u a i k a n ( b i s a b e r d i s k u s i t e r l e b i h d a h u l u a t a u k i r a – k i r a m i n i m a l l e b a r 5 c m d e n g a n r e s o l u s i m i n i m a l 1 5 0 ) . – F o t o u n t u k C o v e r b e r i m a g e s i z e m i n i m a l l e b a r 2 2 c m d e n g a n r e s o l u s i s e k i t a r 3 0 0 .

3. Construction Materials airlifted via helicopter?
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