A colleague calls them Heroes… and though I wouldn’t go that far, I have to admit the boys of Pirate Bay (Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Gottfrid Svartholm) must be the bravest most admired characters on the internet.
In my opinion they basically represent the small fraction of the world population actually worthy of breeding. For those of you who don’t know, Pirate Bay is currently embroiled in a major court case in Sweeden over file sharing.
Will someone please open their god damn eyes already… these guys are just plain right. The cartoon says it all.
For the vast majority of us, there is little we can do but watch the rising and falling power struggles between juggernaut corporate forces and just duck and cover when the beast rolls too close. So it is pretty amazing to see a couple smart asses pull down their pants and piss all over the party.
The best part is even when these bullies aim their cannons directly at our buoyant buccaneers, they just keep on saying “Go Fuck Your Self”. I bought a T-Shirt because my Bad Religion one got ripped up in a fist fight, and this is much more bad ass anyway.
This is what they had on their home page today… I assuming they won’t mind if I republish it here. Click the picture and check out their site.
Fuck The Man!
For more amazing Pirate Bay antics, check out their Legal Threats section.
This is something I would love to be proved wrong about, but upon reflecting on the leadership in the United States I’m under the strained opinion that our county (Canada) is severely lacking any sort of positive force in our elected government. There is a some-what lukewarm consensus in the country that our current Prime-Minister, Stephan Harper, is getting something done, and that we “could do worse”.. but he often seems petulant, authoritative and certainly does not inspire vision or confidence in the general populous. Read the rest of this entry »
Information about major social events are passed down through the generations using systems of communication that are flawed and full of noise. (Oral communication, written word… etc) However, as the example above illustrates, we are getting better at communicating, and the ability for humanity to quickly and accurately assess problems and then convey those problems into a social narrative will enable future generation to benefit from our experience.
This amazing video was created as a thesis by an art student, Jonathan Jarivs, from Pasadena California. This is an excellent and concise explanation of the Credit Crisis the world is currently facing. It also helps illustrate a point about the information economy, and human communication/information evolution. It is one of the major reasons I am so optimistic about the future of humanity and why I am happy to have and raise a family in a world that appears to be going into uncertain and maybe ominous times. Read the rest of this entry »
The desktop snapshot you see below is the result of a few unexpected twists and turns.
This photo of my son, taken by my girlfriend, after some family fun with a gigantic canvass and some acrylic paint.
Thanks to a few tutorials on Lynda.com by Deke McClelland and Chris Orwig I was able to achieve some interesting color effects in photoshop.
I’ve had little Lucas on my desktop for the last 5 months or so, and just yesterday stumbled upon the Tartan designer…
Using Kuler, via the Flickr functionalilty I extracted some of the more interesting colors, and dropped them into the maker.. PRESTO! A comforting desktop based on one of my favorite pictures.
Amazing app called Wordle… created using the words from this blog post.
Amazing tag cloud app
As terrible and cheesy as it is to start a post this way, I have to admit that I have not exactly been the paragon blogger I once thought I would be. It has been months since my last post.
At any rate, I have a pretty good reason. I have been overworked! However it has been good work… really good work.
As of right now I’m juggling a couple of projects, (three ActionScript projects and an html/css/javascript/php/cms one). It’s been extremely challenging finding ways not to loose my head, and to be honest I think I have a couple times.
On an easy day I’m working nearly 12 hours, and I haven’t taken a complete day off since Christmas, which I almost completely worked through. Before that it was the same pattern.
The great thing about all of this, is that I am starting to reach the light at the end of the tunnel (or the end of my rope depending on which way you look at it), and by that I mean light in two very distinct ways.
ONE: I’ve resolved to myself that I will not be taking on any more freelance work. This is mostly due to financial comfort, but also because I am pretty much sick of not having spare time to myself and my family. However, I still have two very time consuming projects to contend with, and god knows how long it will take for those to tail off. Either way… no new work. (Except for personal stuff of course)
TWO: I am starting to grasp the concept of Managing Complexity. Right now I am engrossed in a very compelling programming book by Steve McConnell called Code Complete – incredibly well written, with a loose, clean-flowing and imperative tone. Read the rest of this entry »
I used Camera Raw almost exclusivly for this effect. I reversed the lense vignette, shifted the Lab Colors to green and yellow, and played with the saturation and color channel settings quite drastically. (The channel settings make photo correction and manipulation a pleasure)
This type of conversion may not be for everyone, but I like the end effect.
If you check out my flickr account (by clicking this photo), you will be able to see a few other examples that use a similar effect.
With Indusblue, I wrote a program to gather, read, translate and write results for the Olympic on CBC. I used PHP to handle the hardcore data on the server (30,000+ file, 306 events… etc), but used a ActionScript 3 to create a library so our front end developer could integrate it into the chrome.
Check it out below. You can get your own, and embed it into your site at CBC. Or just check out the “get and share” button on the widget.
I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking lately on ideas around open source and cooperative social integration on a major scale. Interesting enough, on Friday the 13 Indusblue held a meeting of online professional to discuss collaboration between interactive professionals in Toronto.
It was a productive, well attended ad-hoc meeting with the basic goal to develop more open sourced ways of creating and producing excellent ideas.
So as the title implies, I have just started a series on the indusblue blog about the notions of a “Free Economy”.
The idea to write these articles has actually been festering for sometime now. It happened a few years ago in a one-off fashion while I was listening to a talk where Noam Chomsky described the tenets of Anarcho-syndicalism. The idea of a society centralized in the notion of creative endeavour and free from Wage-labour struck a very strong chord with me.
However, it wasn’t until I recently read an interview with Chris Anderson who was describing the main premise of his expected book “Free”, that the whole thing became clear.
Chomsky’s idea of anarchy is hard pressed to be labeled at all. In fact it reads more like an idea of natural organic growth possible in stable societies. The theory acts so similar in function to online communities like Flickr that the correlation is unmistakable, and given Chomsky’s overwhelming disdain for all things oppressively capitalist, this alternative, if possible, leads to very large and powerful conclusions.
I don’t want to give too much away right now, but I’m working on it, and I hope you take the time to visit Indusblue’s blog to get the whole skinny. Keep an eye on my indusblue profile or subscribe to the RSS.
