Wardriving With Doc

Picked up Doc Searls from his hotel in Regents Park last night en route to G&S in Soho (where I would later meet Stowe Boyd, Phil Wolf, and some other fine people I've previously met) and no sooner was he sitting in the passenger seat than he whipped out his not inconsiderably sized widescreen Powerbook and set about firing up his Macstumbler app to scan the route for WiFi hotspots. It was great to chat and share stories, Steven Wright jokes and various other stories from the tech frontline. Both my and Doc's social networks have been converging in one way or another for about 4 years, initially on outer fringes via the Cluetrain mailing list in 2000, then in low earth orbit via our blogrolls and posts and now in good old fashioned facetime - we first met face to face back in May but never got a good opportunity to chat with him properly. I never cease to be amazed and I delight at the way technology influences my life like this.

But I was totally impressed with James Cox's throw-away comment which totally popped my reality valve; with a perfectly serious facial expression and tone, James blurted out "and I can now synchronize my VoodooPad Wiki notes with my iPod." Roll back ten years, nay five even, and such pub talk would have been considered absolutely interplanetary in nature and origin. OK, maybe that sentence is still interplanetary to 99.9% of the population, but 0.1% of seven billion is still a big number. Awesome.

I also smirked when the discussion about RFID cited an example in Bulgaria (I think) where an RFID trial involved having an embedded chip in your upper arm, facilitating automatic payment for goods (presumably just by waving your arm about), but I did wonder how long it would be before people had RFID chips on their shoulders, and would people with RFID chips on their shoulders actually be resentful about the fact whilst simultaneously enjoying their new found consumer freedom?

Under Deconstruction

Digital lobotomy. Faking one's own life. The unlikeable bareness of being. Get in touch with your inner Stalin. Send him a post-card. Tell him you miss him. You want him back. You miss his moustache. And his Dr evil Suit. Build a sharkpool under your boardroom. Write poetry on your neighbours' lawns with lawn food granules and watch their faces a week later. Copy out highly complex mathematical equations onto your colleagues' office whiteboards after everyone has gone home and insert in a couple of product or client names as variables for total authenticity. Then deny all knowledge. Arrange your own near life experience. Play Russian Roulette with the coffee vending machine by randomly pressing menu buttons. Drink whatever comes out. Even if it's vegetable soup at 7am.

Have a near life experience. Have a nice day.

Spam Bin

Years ago, when computers had miniscule memory and storage capacities, the process of deleting things was fundamental to their basic operation for the simple reason that disks would fill up rendering the computer inoperable.

These days however, the only time I ever seem to use a Delete function is to remove spam from my inbox or blog's comments.

I have a server in another room in our home with about 100GB of disk capacity and in the last three years I cannot remember deleting a single thing because I was running out of space. That's all my MP3's, thousands of digital photographs, countless images and blog designs, years of word processor documents and spreadsheets.

I wonder if the next version of windows will rename "Recycle Bin" to "Spam Bin" or if indeed, someone will invent a way to recycle Spam itself. Like a waste disposal processing facility that takes a pile of waste and turns it into something useful.

I suppose in the future we may well see substandard quality printed advertisements with the words "Made from recycled SPAM" printed on the side.