Two weeks too late

She sat across from me at Saffrons
wearing my 10 year old jacket
drinking the last half of my beer
I thought to myself, I want nothing more
than to be that jacket, across her arms,
to be that beer, pressed against her lips
Jealousy towards inanimate objects
is a new emotion for me
But these things were touching her soft skin,
tasting her sweet mouth in open defiance
of my own desire
and yet I said nothing.

As we sat in her living room one night
reading through her diaries, talking and laughing
drinking wine and enjoying each other
I thought to myself I want nothing more
than to be her diary, object of affection
to be the paper on which her soul pours
She sat beside me and read intimate moments
of her lovers, past lives
And I stared at her beauty, both outside and in
and wondered what twist of fate put me there
to want her so badly
and yet I said nothing.

As I sat in my room after a night of beers
with her and her friends and my unspoken desire
plans astray, my life in turmoil
I thought to myself I want nothing more
than to call her up, tell her my feelings
to ease the burden of my silent lips
this I did, but to no avail.
two weeks too late to share my thoughts
she'd found someone else, I was a loss
My heart ached with each word as it poured into me
It hadn't occurred to her I wanted more
as I had only ever said nothing

Gmail

I'll make one prediction, and I hope I'm right. Google will not allow public sign up for their gmail service - they only want to let friends of friends in. If you don't get a gmail invite, you're not going to get a gmail account. There's a number of really excellent reasons to do it this way, too. First of all, now they instantly know who is connected to who. Why are those social network programs like Friendster and Orkut so popular? The value the link between people as the highest metric for classifying individuals. By rolling out the gmail service with invites only, they build the database backend which allow them to introduce the next generation of social software - something that combines a vast storage of personal net space with a messaging, file sharing and social networking backbone. Eventually they'll eliminate spam: Only emails from other gmail accounts are trusted, everything else (except perhaps trusted partners) is disregarded as junk. So the next evolution of the Internet begins, but here's the problem - the only way this can properly work is if we hand over a lot of our privacy into the hands of one company. How trustworthy is Google?

Beheadings

I checked in on the ol' Internet tonight and saw that it was abuzz with the recent beheadings. I followed a thread to comment when it was at 3 pages, when I had finished composing it had grown to 11. I love how the Internet localizes the attention of the wired world at certain points when particularily shocking events occur. The forum I linked to seemed awash with condemnation of Islam and the Eastern philosophy in general. I felt compelled to post a comment about tolerance and messages of peace and love because gosh darn it, I'm a fricking hippy.

******************************************

These images are disturbing, no doubt. If anything, though, I wish that more people in our world would see the violence that results from infliciting our lifestyle on the rest of the world. Why did this man's life have to end? Why has it come to this, a most brutal act that shows just what we're capable of inflicting on each other because of a culture clash of civilizations?

There has been a lot of spoken grief towards the family of this victim. I appreciate the sentiment that our culture can produce, because we've had this opportunity to really try and value each others lives. That's something that the West has I believe really taken a hold of - we don't really want to have anything to do with violence. Look at that! A culture that tries to appreciate the sanctity of life. For us, the images that we see before us are horrific. Is it only because we don't ever see violent death, or is it because we've really come to appreciate the fact of life?

What kind of forces would drive a person to brutally kill someone in this way? What is the root of this war between the east and west? Religion, pure and simple. They perceive us to have this fundamentalist Christian heritage because it is the only religion being portrayed in the Media. We perceive them to have this fundamentalist Islamic heritiage because it is the only religiion being portrayed in the Media. This works well if you're a fundamentalist, because you have something to hate and therefore something to hold on to. The problem comes with the moderates, who aren't really sure what to think about religion anymore. I'm one of the latter, one who has grown up with computers and then the Internet and seen all the potential that this vastly more complex, interconnected network can provide humankind. If only there was some way that we could talk to our enemy, maybe some really tight translation software and, of course, an equal number of 'opponents' in which to partake in discussion.

I see a lot of angry comments towards Islam. I'm not Islamic, but then neither am I a Christian. I just don't think that we can judge a relgion by the actions of it's radicals. Every culture does produces radicals - it's a part of a changing society because it's mainly the outliers that bring in new memes for everyone else to digest. If that meme resonates with enough people then it produces an overall change in the pattern of people. What we're doing here though is rejecting a very influential meme before we even get a chance to process it. It's a defense mechanism - you build static structures because there's a chance that a new idea will destroy your world as opposed to saving it. The thing is, if you want to improve your life then you have to process as many memes as possible. It adds to your individual complexity. It gives you faith in yourself.

I've always believed that understanding as many people as I can will make me a better person. What worries me is that unless we can somehow communicate our beliefs to a higher degree of quality then we'll all just end up killing each other. It seems so tragic for a species with such potential.

I see the way this world is going. We're polarizing ourselves in order to make our individual world understandable. Why else would we kill other people? Are we as innocent as we would like to think? Have we not spilled blood in a horrffic fashion to the people of the east? Did every smart bomb reach it's target, or were innocent people who had their own lives like this helicopter repairman brutally murdered in the name of War?

Before we condemn our enemies, perhaps we should condemn ourselves. We have approached a foreign culture with a cluster bomb in one hand and a can of coke in the other. Surely there are more positive aspects of our culture that we can approach foreign people with? What about tolerance, equality and fair justice? What about the idea of representational rule? Surely this idea which has so greatly benefitied our lives could be instrumental in benefiting other lives as well? We don't seem to be going about it the right way, and all of our best efforts seem to be exploding in our face.

Unless, of course, you're happy hating people for the sake of hating someone. It seems to me that this class of people is something that we as a surviving species can do without. What did Kennedy say? "We live in one world, we gotta breath in the same air, we gotta live together, we're gonna die together."* Just because a culture or a person is foreign and strange to your perception doesn't mean that their right to life is any weaker than your right to life. We're all human beings, and we're just trying to figure out a way to live together on this fragile blue planet.

*Taken from the following video, compiled in February / 2002. S-11 Redux is a sound-bite blitzkrieg that challenges the messages we have been fed from our mainstream media and the government it serves. Be warned - this video moves quickly and will require at least two viewings to digest its full impact. I wholeheartedly recommend viewing the messages from the last third again. (via The Guirella News Network - top right corner to download):
http://gnn.tv/redux/

Armageddon

Sometimes I wonder why I'm so easily duped. I like to think I have critical thought processes, that I can separate the wheat from the chafe. The last couple of days a meme has been bouncing around in my head like a frenzied piranha, feeding on all of my fears and anxieties about the future of our world. The whole debacle started while looking to whore out the new website I started, WinnipegForums.ca. I only knew of a couple of Winnipeg-centric forums on which to announce the new bastion of Winnipeg discussion, one of them from having read forums for a local lan party. I set out to investigate All your base cafe to post a welcome message to anyone who was interested in talking about politics. There, glowing on my screen like a beacon of finality, lay a thread entitled "end of the world is coming? (smells like bs)". Clicking and following the ether trail I found myself at a religiously tilted pro bush site proclaiming that the end of the world was upon us, that on June 19th the first meteor would strike.

I'm normally quite sceptical about such things but I read them anyways out of a morbid sense that at some point or another, the shit is going to hit the fan. The link was a gathering of a series of posts on some unmentioned (and subsequently 'mysteriously shutdown') forum by a person known only as "Aussie Bloke". AB was very vague on specifics, yet he laid a series of bread crumb clues that started to add up to some interesting coincidences. He claimed that the solar system was on an intersection course with a dust cloud containing three objects - two of which will hit the earth with some certainty, one of which was anomalous and not a meteor / comet or anything that had been seen before.

One of the links mentioned was about the sunshine reaching the Earth was dropping by 2 to 3% per decade, an article that I had previously read. I started to do some googling to see what others had written about this subject, and I found articles about how the Federal Reserve has been shifting money around in alarming ways, how the US navy had deployed more carrier groups to sea than had ever been done in history, the seemingly strange increase in the occurrences of large meteorites, and I started to panic. Every piece of new I read added to the puzzle. I, myself, had recently seen an incredibly large shooting star not two weeks ago. The facts were starting to pile up. Armageddon was at hand.

So at this point I was convinced. After relaying these facts to the kitty the next day, we became convinced that this was in fact the End Times, strangely (to me) prophesized and about to inflict incredible hardship on an already overworked system. What would I do? Would I survive? How would we live? The original piece by Aussie Bloke indicated that there would be many years of hardship, as humanity preyed on each other in order to survive on a shattered planet. He claimed that it would get better after that mystical year of 2012, but the years in between would be out of a Mad Max style Sci-Fi novel. Whatever it took to survive. I began to count up my batteries. I also told friends. I told my mother to sell her mutual funds, they wouldn't matter in 4 days. She told me that if that if it were true, that I should try and have a fun time before the terror began. Better advice I'd never heard. ;)

One day later and this prediction of upcoming horrors haunted me. I scoured the internet for any additional pieces to fit the puzzle. As I figured this cloud of debris was the remnants of a Supernova, and as this cataclysmic event seemed to follow events in the Bible, I figured that the Star of Bethlehem was a star exploding and was also probably the source of our Armageddon. It seemed to make sense in a poetic way. Evidently, I wasn't the only one to come to this conclusion. Astronomers had located a binary pulsar that would have seemed to have exploded at around the right time to reach Earth at around 2 B.C. So here was the source of our doom, but was it possible? If things happen like they're supposed to in the Bible, then this would be true. However I decided to try and factor in some good old fashion science and see if the results agreed. This is where the truth and fiction start to diverge.

In order to find out if the binary pulsar in question, 1913+16, was the source of these meteors I had to find out how far away from Earth it was. Mass takes a much longer time to travel than light, so if this pulsar was more than say 50 light years from Earth then there was no way that the meteors would reach us 2000 years later. It just doesn't travel that fast. So after doing countless searches (apparently binary pulsar 1913+16 is famous for being the first binary pulsar to be discovered) I finally found an article that compared it to another set of pulsars which were much better to study, because at 2000 light years they were 10 times closer than 1913+16. So there it was, one claim shattered. There was no way that the supernova that probably led the wise men to Christ would have ejected the matter that was (apparently) coming to destroy us. With one puzzle piece gone, the whole mess started to fall apart.

Eventually I stumbled upon a thread at Above Top Secret, a website devoted to conspiracy theories and other such topics. This thread contained a message from an anonymous group called "The Monitors" which claimed that the entire theory was an experiment of theirs, run to gauge the response of the general population to Armageddon memes.

So after all of this nothing has come to pass. I felt betrayed by an idea, ashamed at my gullibility and yet at the same time the possibility remains embedded in my brain. Tonight was a clear sky, the stars were out. All I could think as I had a cigarette was whether or not those twinkles of other worlds seemed dimmer then usual.

Final draft

Introductions

Hi. You don't know me. Keep reading and you will. I'm a Winnipegger much like yourself, and I've lived here nearly my entire life. I've travelled overseas but my heart will always lie in this forgotten city. There's just something about it. The mosquitoes, the winters, the road construction - I'm a glutton for punishment. Still, sitting back on a warm spring evening cracking a beer and enjoying the clear skies - you'll never fully appreciate it unless you've been through one of our bitter winters.

Right now you're probably thinking, “What’s this guy on?” I admit; I’m a bit of a nutjob. I do have an idea though and I think it's a good one. As Winnipeggers, we understand the power of community; the strength of unity and communication. We can use the Internet to get to know each other better, to reinforce our unique society. I've started a website, WinnipegForums.ca, where we can all get together and chat. That's the beauty of the Internet - it's the great equalizer. Everyone has a voice and nobody can speak louder than anyone else.

Interest in politics is on the decline. Quite a few people around me don't know what's going on with the upcoming elections, and some frankly don't care. This upsets me. We live in a blessed country; able to exercise the will of the people to invoke change in the way we live. Has everyone lost interest?

Voter apathy. Why has this meme* entered into our consciousness? Does it mean we're lazy, that we're sheep? Do we have the intelligence to question the course set by our lack of interest? I question. My buddies and I have a saying: Learn to question, question to learn. We question everything and in doing so we learn a lot about the world around us. Let me tell you, there is a lot to question.

WinnipegForums.ca is a non-partisan, not for profit site dedicated to questioning the values of our elected leaders. We must make sure that the interests of the people are being represented by the majority. That's what democracy stands for, rule by the majority. If the minority disagrees, they hold the responsibility of convincing those in the majority that they're wrong. This is discussion, conversation and what it really means to be human in our times.

This world is a confusing place. Through the news, we witness all the events taking place in the world that are terrible, horrible and foreign to our sedate (in comparison) life. This is the world we live in. We must come to terms with it, or we'll become distant from our global problems. However, our true strength lies in our power to change our own city, and our own country. Let’s sit down and talk about some of the issues. Maybe we can create some new ideas that will resonate with the majority of the people. Everyone is connected by six degrees of separation to everyone else on the planet. (In Winnipeg it’s probably closer to 1 or 2 degrees!) Who knows what events will occur because of actions we take? What better way to be confident about the choices we make then to have fleshed out the possibilities with your neighbours.

The elections are right around the corner. If you like the thought of local discussion and debate, then make sure you go to WinnipegForums.ca and check it out. It's free to register and registration is required if you want to post messages. If you want to lurk anonymously go right ahead, but a forum is always better when everyone contributes their ideas. Who knows? You might change someone's perception of an issue, or even (god forbid) change your own. If you like it, tell a friend. Spread the word. You know the score.
*meme (m m): A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.

Posters

Ok, Wally has made up some posters that we're going to spreading around town. I think we'll try and put these on the streets and at the intersections, but I've got another idea for the bus stops. Hopefully Wally reads this tomorrow and starts putting one together. ;) I'm going to put the post below as one giant poster, so if you're reading this imagine that you're a Winnipegger waiting for a bus with the hint of elections in the air. Let me know what you think.

Introductions

Hi. You don't know me but hopefully you will after you've read this. I'm a Winnipegger much like yourself, and I've lived in Winnipeg for pretty much my entire life. I've travelled overseas but my heart will always lie here in this forgotten city. There's just something about it, you know? The mosquitos, the winters, the road construction - maybe I'm a glutton for punishment. Even still, sitting back on a warm spring evening cracking a beer and enjoying the clear skies - you'll never appreciate it unless you've been through one of our bitter winters.

Right now you're probably thinking, what the hell is this guy on? Fair enough, you're not far from the truth. I do have an idea though, and it's a good one. I think that all of us Winnipeggers should see that we can use the Internet as a tool to get to know each other better. I don't see anything wrong with having a couple extra drinking buddies, but then again, that may be just me. So I've decided to start this website, WinnipegForums.ca, where we can all just get together and chat. That's the beauty of the Internet - it's the great equalizer. Everyone has a voice and nobody can speak louder than anyone else.

So I was thinking to myself, why isn't there much interest in politics? I see quite a few people around me who don't know what's going with the upcoming elections, and even some who frankly don't even really care. That upsets me. We live here in a blessed country, able to exersize the will of the people to invoke change in the way we live but everyone's lost interest. Voter apathy. Why has that meme even entered into our consciousness? Does it mean we're lazy, that we're sheep? Do we even have the intelligence to question what course our lack of interest will send us on? I question. My buddies and I have a saying: Learn to question, question to learn. We question everything and in doing so we learn a lot about the world around us. Let me tell you, there is a lot to question.

WinnipegForums.ca is a non-partisan site dedicated to questioning the values that our elected leaders have, to make sure that the interests of the people are being represented by the majority. That's what democracy stands for, rule by the majority. If the minority disagrees, then they have the responsibility of the convincing those in the majority that they're wrong. This is discussion, conversations and what it really means to be human.

This world is a confusing place right now. We have so many problems with the information overload from the news; all the events taking place in the world that are terrible, horrible and so foreign compared to our sedate life. This is the world we live in. We have to come to terms with it, or we'll become distant of the problems of other places. Still, all we have the power to change is our own city, and our own country. If we at least sat down and talked about some of the issues, maybe we can create some new ideas that will resonate with the majority of the people. Everyone is connected by six degrees to everyone else on the planet. Yeah, we're talking Kevin Bacon here - not with movies, but with people. Who knows what events will occur because of actions we take? What better way to be confident about ones actions then to have fleshed them out with a couple neighbours.

Ok, I have grand ideas. Maybe Winnipeg isn't ready for a real discussion site, but it can't hurt in trying. There's not much time though, the election is right around the corner. If you like the thought of us all sitting around and chatting then make sure you go to WinnipegForums.ca and check it out. It's free to register but registration is required if you want to post. If you want to lurk go right ahead, but a forum is always better when everyone contributes their ideas. Who knows? You might change someone's perception of an issue, or even (god forbid) change your own. If you like it, tell a friend. Spread the word. You know the score.

(I really wanted to include these lyrics but I couldn't find a good place for them. Still, I've never seen a better summary of the problems in the world in one song before so I'm going to post them here anyways)

Slackmule

Well, the probability of getting everything ready to go for tomorrow is hovering around 5% as of this moment. I'm not too concerned - I'm getting better vibes off a Sunday evening launch. I've got some new ideas for the forums which I have to put in effect and I still have a lot of data compilation to do. I guess I'm going to have to start treating this like homework soon or I'll never get it done.

I can envision teams of two ninjas, prowling the dusk, jumping out of bushes and surprise postering bustops. Perhaps there's be a competition to see who postered fastest. I know that I'm going to have to have a small party afterwords or I'll never confirm any volunteers. I'm excited but nervous as I can see this project failing miserably, but at the same time there seems to be a possibility that it's the right place at the right time. I don't know, we'll see soon enough.

winnipegforums.ca

Well, progress was a little slow today. I've got the site up and running, but I haven't started doing the necessary research for the initial setup. As opposed to heading home and doing some hardcore surfing / research, I got pulled into seeing Super Size Me, a documentary about a guy who eats nothing but McDicks three times a day for 30 days straight. I'll just say for the record that I'm never eating from the golden arches again.

So I'm behind schedule. What else is new? I have to dig deep and compile a list of all the ridings and the candidates for each party in said ridings. Then I have to put together a list of issues, and finally I must start some arguments in order to make it a little bit interesting before I launch.

Probability of successful completion of all tasks: 80%

A Call to Arms

Politics have once again come to Canada, and I've become involved in the Conservative party because a long time friend is running for the federal government. I've been doing his webpage and I feel pretty bad about it as I don't agree with anything his party stands for. I realized that I have to balance out this 'evil' I'm doing, so I'm going to be starting a non-partisan web forum for Winnipeggers to discuss the politics that are coming up. Along with the federal election we also have a mayoral election as our old mayor (Glen Murray) has stepped down to run for the Liberal party (and of course he's running in the same riding as my friend).

So I've registered the domain (I think - stupid domainsatcost.ca) and I'll be setting up the site in a couple of days. Once I've got the forum up and the look and feel that I want I'll be starting some threads there so that people who visit the site will have something to read. Feel free to participate once I'm at that point, but this is not where I need your help.

What I need from anyone who wants to help iis to go through this blog or Wally's and look for any quotes or 'wordbites' that are interesting or controversial. Why? I'm going to be coordinating a large advertisement campaign in the next week. The main method is going to be large posters with the URL of the website in large print so that people driving by can read the web address. I'll be posting these up all over town on light and electricity posts, at bus stops and universities etc. However I want to have something on these posters that pedestrians can read, and the only sources I feel comfortable quoting are mine and my buddies sites. So I need you to scan through and find anything that seems interesting to you. You can include peoples comments as well because it falls under my creative commons license.

I really need your help here; there's no way I can go through it all and find good quotes. Besides, I'm much more interested in what other people like as opposed to what I like. Look at it this way - if this takes off (and I think it will) then you can feel like you foreigners have influenced an election in another Country.

Also, feel free to submit quotes from your own pages - if I use them in the posters I'll make sure and give you props on the website when it's up. Just make sure you include the URL so I can link back to it. I need help here, I'm never going to be able to do this alone. ;)

Distractions

I've pulled the number one blog faux pas: I've pulled myself out of the online world for the last couple of weeks with no warning; with no explanation for my absence. For all of you few who read my blog I could be dead. I'm not, I'm still here poking around but I have been distracted. There were a number of events that lead to the derailing of my blog.

It started with the piece I wrote, Welcome to the Noosphere. I really put some effort into it, and i wanted to continue the format of writing largish essays with less frequency than just commenting on whatever meme of the day was floating around the web. So I stopped updating as much while I 'worked' on some new pieces. At this same time, one of my best friends decided to surprise us all by coming into town and visit for two weeks. He's been living life quite happily in England for almost a year now, but here he was, back in Winnipeg and forcing us out of our ruts. During this time I was quite busy, so I can understand the lack of updates. Given the choice between writing and hanging out with Howie, I'd take Howie every time.

There were two other distractions that had emerged to take a lot of mental processing by the time Howie left. One was an online game, the other was a woman. I'll talk about the game first.

I've been playing these free online games at WSA for quite some time now. If you've never played video games or if they hold absolutely no interest to you then you'd probably better skip the next couple of paragraphs.

This game that I started playing is an intensely competitive tactical role playing experience. How to describe this without going into too much detail... Ultimately this game is about diplomacy and strategy. The diplomacy comes with convincing all the people that are in your alliance that you're competent enough to lead them; the strategy comes in coordinating attacks and defense amongst your alliance members. I started off the leader of a small alliance and as the game progressed it became a bigger alliance. When you become responsible for the collective strength of an alliance of 40 people then you can start to get compulsive about making sure that everything is going well. Everything did go well, and as this was my first real experience as a leader I think I pulled it off. However, this game requires endless conversations, debates and arguments. That's the diplomacy part.

I put my all into this game for the last 3 weeks, but now the time has come for me to pass the torch. The mantle of leadership has changed as alliances have merged, and I realize that ultimately this is probably the best for me. As going from a leader to grunt takes the intensity out of the game, I can now concentrate on some more important things. One of these things is a new project that I'm forcing myself to do: I've (sortof) registered a domain winnipegforums.ca (Not working yet) that I'm going to try and whore out to Winnipeg. We're currently in the throes of an election and I feel that the the merging of politics and the internet hasn't really taken off here. I'm going to do something about that - I will be setting up this forum and then doing an advertising campaign over the next week. I'm going to treat this as an experiment, so I'll try and do lots of documentation as I go along. Stay tuned!

I guess I've sort of made a promise to myself not to talk too much about my personal, personal life on this blog, however I feel certain things are important to at least mention, especially as it is the largest distraction for me: I've met an incredible girl that is slowly consuming my world. This my friends is the good kind of consumption. ;) It's hard to talk in generalities, so I won't - all I'll say is that it's very pleasant to be distracted sometimes.