I had not read a book in a while so when I picked up my first one to start reading I was like a sponge, I just seemed to absorb the book, pages at a time.

Keeping It Real by Justina Robson. I read the whole book in a sitting and when I put it down I reflected on it. I liked it, it was not a bad book but something was off, something was out of place or off kilter and it was starting to get to me.

The story is about a female operative in Earth Security force. Years ago there was a massive disturbance that ripped open holes to connecting realities. Our main character, Lila Black, has become a cyborg of outstanding capabilities. She is strong, tough, sexy and has this amazing cyborg body to enable her to be an unstoppable force of nature.

Then it hit me. She wasn’t. Female author writing a novel where the main character is this incredibly strong female lead, who isn’t strong at all. Every interaction with new people she cannot control her emotions, she has trouble thinking her way around things. That’s fine, because the author has given her a powerful black motorbike! That’s tough right? Whenever our heroine gets into a fight one of three things happen. She loses, she wins because of someone else or her inbuilt AI in the cyborg body takes over and wins for her.

Throughout the book the author builds up how powerful our heroine is in her Cyborg body, Stronger, faster, equipped with more weapons than you can count all controlled either by her or assisted by an incredibly advanced AI system. So I spent the whole book waiting, waiting for the watershed moment where she is forced into a situation where she goes completely off the wall. No restrictions, no holding back just all out assualt.

Of course this never happens, she either runs away or someone else saves her. Everything about it seems like the character herself is fighting against the author.

That’s what got me. This well built, amazingly setup and fleshed out character, stupidly strong and self reliant and this author turned her into a weak-willed emotional female who is useless unless the strong manly, men come to save her.

Here’s hoping the rest of the books are better.

Google smacked China. Basically what happened was Google became aware that it was under highly advanced and targeted attacks against its Gmail section. It was originating from inside China and going after the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Then they got serious and started digging. Finding that dozens of US, European and Chinese Gmail account for activists were being routinely accessed, not through Google’s breach but through each account holders breach. Add in to all this that the attack was not just on Google but on around 20 other large companies this is massive news.

With this Google has been sharing around the information it has gathered so far with other relevant parties.

The upshot of this? When Google first entered into China, opened up offices and started up Google.cn I was impressed. I have lived in China for a while and the greatest problem there, is not the corruption, the systemic caste system of communist party members and non-members. No the greatest problem is knowledge about the world and current events. opening up Google like this could only be a good thing… and then we found out that Google would filter the results. I can see their argument, opening up the internet is a great achievement and paying for it by censoring some results was a small price. however like the rest of the world China is hurriedly going ass-backwards on how the internet should work.

So now Google has flat out said “No, no more. We will not censor results for you. if you don’t like that then we will take our ball and go home.” effectively? Suck it China.

This is amazing, this is  wonderful and yet I can’t find much information or coverage on this. The ramifications are huge. If nothing else this should force a light onto China, if Google does pull out then everyone will sit up and pay attention.

As I said the greatest problem in China is the lack of world knowledge, so the greatest threat to the Chinese government is people waking up and paying attention.

As David Klemke already wrote over on his blog people use New Year Resolutions as dreams. That’s a good way of putting it. The majority of my friends resolutions boil down to the usual few, Cut back on drinking, play less games, lose weight, get fit, etc, etc.

They are great ideas in theory but in practice they are so nebulous that trying to achieve them is nigh impossible. Not only because you don’t have a plan but because you don’t have a goal! Cut back on drinking, as in what? Once a day, a week, an hour? What?

To achieve in a resolution you need a defined goal then you need to construct the required steps to achieve that goal. If it is lose weight, how much? So you are 100kg with 25% body fat, create a target, say 90kg and 17% and then define down how you are to go about achieving it.

New Year’s Resolutions have gone out of fashion and a lot of people make the comment of why bother making them only on New Years? Well it’s a good enough time, you might as well. Set a goal, set what you need to achieve it, track your progress and then get it done.

I tackled this problem myself like a geek. I built a spreadsheet of what I wanted to achieve each day and defined down a point system for this. At a glance I can see what I achieved on any given day and what I should achieve to feel good about myself. I am currently trying to clean it up as a few people have expressed interest in it.

It’s now 12 days after New Years. It’s no longer a New year’s Resolution, it’s a life resolution. Make one, see what happens.

First, just in case, the internet filter is a scheme by which the Australian government will filter websites at the URL level. This is being put forth as a way to protect the children, the rallying cry of people with ulterior motives.

I will not be pointing out the flaws of this service, that has already been covered many times, for more reading go here.

No, what has me more worried are two things. One, the only people who really seem to care about this are tech people. People who understand the dangers of limiting our access to a free and open internet, the people who understand the “think of the children” as a ploy. This is anecdotal, sure, but the general response from people who don’t quite understand it is “what’s your point? It’s a good thing right? it stops child porn!” I am not sure how to combat this, there does not seem to be any form of widespread movement against it, No Clean Feed are doing their best but they can only do so much. Add in the fact Conroy is being a sneaky bitch by trying to get it passed in February but will not implement anything until after the election.

The other thing that worries me more and is a growing trend to match the trend of the world’s leaders trying to filter the internet. The tech people, the people who are the best placed to understand what is going on and to do something about it. The overwhelming response? “It’s so stupid, they can put this in place but I will just get around it!” No! That is not the point! Open access to the internet is not something you should have to “get around”. What about the average user? Should we not be fighting this trend of retardation? Should we not be using our knowledge to show why open access to the internet is the best possible option?

The thing that gets most people, is you have to pay for the good with the bad. Let me explain. All forms of freedom are tempered. The freedom of speech means that you are free to speak what you believe in without fear of reprisal. The flip side is you will hear a lot of things that you don’t agree with. The freedom to access whatever reading material’s or magazine’s you want means that you have to allow porn. There is always a price. The freedom of having an unrestricted, open internet mean everyone can access what sites they want without judgement. That also means, again, lots of porn.

This all comes back to the original problem. The filtering will go through under the banner of Think of the Children. however the same argument stands. The government should not be able to judge what you can and cannot do. If you as a parent are worried about your children, how about you act like a parent and do your fucking job? do you let your children have their own machine in an unmonitored area? Then anything that happens is your fault. Do you notice your children spending hours a day on the machine? How about connecting with your children over what is it currently their main pastime.

We as tech people need to stop saying this will not affect me because we can circumvent it. We need to start doing something about educating people to the dangers of this god awful scheme. If someone says “Think of the Children” then simply help them setup OpenDNS on their children’s machine. It’s worth the effort.

With my time of I decided to finally start up the game I was scared off. Dragon Age. Scared because I know what I am like with Bioware games, I stop all required functions to survive to play those games as they take over my life. So I picked up a copy when the game came out but waited, left it sitting there taunting me. I needed time when me disappearing from reality would not be so detrimental.

I am glad I did. I started Dragon Age last Thursday, now on Monday my stats are showing I have put a shade over 60 hours into this game. Sickening? maybe… worth it? Totally.

I will not gush fanboy style over it, as I can easily see its faults. However this is easily the game of the last year. No question. The other thing it should be is the poster child of gaming. This is what people should associate with gaming, this grown up, adult story of grand fiction. Filled with care and depth that extends past most novels. With characterization on such levels that sometimes I had to just stop and walk away, unable to continue the conversation.

Instead we get Modern Warfare 2. MW2 is what is the public face of gaming and that makes me sad. When MW1 came out it was a big hit, you could make the argument, rightly so.  Not to get onto my PC gaming is king spiel, but what made MW1 so popular is that it feels right, the movement, the aiming and the shooting are all spot on. You know, Counter Strike for the console generation. So after the popularity of MW1 we got a slew of games that suddenly had to be like Modern Warfare, copycats if you will. Now with MW2 reaching such heights of exposure you can bet your ass people are going to copy…oh what’s that? Medal of Honour the big competing console franchise is shifting its focus of Warfare into the Modern era? Really?…..

These are the two big games of last year and the influence on them is easy to see. They are both trying to achieve the same thing, an immersive, epic experience for their players. But they are coming from two different directions, MW2 has looked at the money and popularity of movies and gone “We can do that better”. Hence it playing like a summer blockbuster, exciting and noisy but when you scratch away its surface you find it hollow underneath. Dragon age comes from books and storytelling so it is unapologetically involved. The sheer amount of history and writing involved is scary to think of, designing a whole new world with a coherent power, economic and religious structure.

As I said before it is not without its faults. They are mostly on the technical level, the camera is like a wayward child who has gotten drunk out the back, the fact it starts up and goes “here is the world… have fun!” Not hand holding, no real tutorials, it is a PC-assed PC game. I had played for 30 hours before I found out I could pick pockets, or that = would select my entire party.

Sure gaming has a long way to go to be grown up. But it will be games like Dragon Age that will be maturing the field, companies like Bioware that will expand on what is possible.

What I have found while doing this is any form of music can be enjoyable. Music grows on you; you can learn to enjoy anything.

So when other people say “goddamn I hate rap” they just have not been exposed to it. People’s music tastes are set when they are developing, I would say around the teens. Then it starts to solidify. Once you hit the late teens/early twenties your music tastes are pretty much set. Whatever music you were enjoying then you will continue to enjoy for the rest of your life.

This can be changed but change is scary. Also to what end? To quote Ghost in the Shell “Over-specialise and you breed in weakness”. Following the one genre or a narrow field will lead to dismissing all other forms of music. Learning to expand your field of interest is not only a great boon as you can converse and connect to anyone about music but it also puts you into a different head space.

Music has such a profound effect on your emotions, a snatched piece of a song can instantly transport you 10 years and halfway across the world. So what happens if your only enjoyable music is death metal? If that is all you listen to then it is going to influence you towards an angrier, despondent disposition. Psy-Trance? You start to lose the ability to follow and appreciate lyrics and well sung harmonies. These are broad stroke generalizations but they have the ring of truth. Learning to enjoy more genres’ means you can cater your music to your mood, not the other way around.

The longer you leave it the harder it gets and, just as frustrating, it is something you constantly have to work at. The moment you stop exploring different forms of music you start to lose the ability to enjoy new music.

Well, I will leave it there, below are links to some of the best examples of each genre. There are too many genre’s for me to list but here is a start, feel free to add something I am missing.

Classical – Ave Maria

Rock – The Offspring – Gone Away

Opera – Pirates of Penzance – With Cat Like Tread

Punk – The Vibrators – Baby Baby

Metal – Tool – Lateralus

Death Metal – In Flames – Crawl Though Knives

Indie Rock  – Okkervil River – Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe

Folk Rock – Mumford and Sons – Little Lion Man

Folk – Redgum – I Was Only Nineteen

HipHop – Hilltop Hoods – The Nosebleed Section

Rap – Tech N9ne – Beast

PsyTrance – Infected Mushroom – Deeply Distrubed

Dance – 4 Strings – Diving

Alt Country – Michelle Branch – Everywhere

Pop – Lady Gaga – Bad Romance

Acapella – A Perfect Circle – Fiddle and the Drum

While I was looking through the numbers for how much time was spent playing games I was shocked to say the least. 10,000 hours is a hell of a lot of time and as Chris pointed out, 10,000 hours would be about right for the required amount of time to become an expert at something. That amount of time though was dwarfed by the amount of time spent watching TV.

I always knew people watched a tremendous amount of TV. When I found some statistics though I must admit I felt slightly ill. The Nielson group released the following figures. In the first quarter of this year the average for people aged 25-30 was 144 hours a month, which spins out to be a shade un 5 hours a day. 5 Hours a day!? Jesus Christ. In the five years between 25-30 we will average 8,500 hours.

As the age bracket creeps up it just gets worse. When we finally hit 65+ we are watching around 7 hours a day. That is such a disgustingly large amount of TV.

Where does my term of Social Surplus come from though? Well that’s exactly what this TV viewing is. I would argue that using that using this time to play games is more, if only slightly in some cases (Looking at MMO’s here), productive. Watching TV is basically a time sink, you get nothing out of it except the fleeting enjoyment that is gone the moment you stand up. It is lost time. Again as with games I understand people need to relax and unwind, but for 5 hours a day?

To put it into numbers that we are able to relate to lets have a look at Wikipedia. We all know it, we all use it, we have an understanding, if shaky, of just how massive an undertaking it was/is. Lets say using their page of what has been done and doing some dodgy numbers we come up with 150million hours of collective human effort. Everything, every article, every edit, every language, we would be talking in the ball park of 150million hours of effort.

Now let’s look at the amount of time that the age bracket of 25-30year olds in America spent watching TV in one year. Call it 22Million people (going on rough data here) at 4.8 hours a day we end up with:

38,544,000,000

That’s for one age group. Each year. Spent wasting time in front of the TV. That is the equivalent of over 250 Wikipedia’s every year. That’s a complete and whole new encyclopedia of all human knowledge every two days! Being pissed away watching American Idol.

Getting people to do any form of work is difficult. The only reason most people have a job is money, not enjoyment. The reason Wikipedia worked is that anyone could spend any amount of time on it they wanted and straight away get something back. It extended itself and said “Look, the tools are here, help yourself”. Anything that can do that will work; we only have to look at something as stupid as, say, lolcats. It extends the idea of “look, if you have a picture of a cat and large Helvetica Font you can participate”. And people did, in droves. It is a meme that has still not totally died.

People no longer expect or even accept media that does not extend itself to them. Whenever I read anything on the internet I now instinctively spin to the bottom and read the comments. The only reason I still read Slashdot is for the comment. Even here I changed over my blog to WordPress because it had easy to use comments.

I believe the next big thing; the next great advancement will somehow involve harnessing this massive amount of social surplus and funneling it into something else. It will require a rethinking of the almost all forms of media. Any form of news story that I cannot comment on? Not interested.

As I said finding a way of channeling this surplus is key. A project like Wikipedia was a great idea but there are hundreds more. How about a relationship mapping chart? You would start from you and input all the family links that you know of. If it got large enough you could travel down those links to see who else you are connected to. As long as it had a simple interface and an inviting look it could work. Or a hyper local news site where you could jump in to your local area and read what is going on or post what you have seen, specials down at the local café, road works on this side street.

The possibilities when you start thinking in these numbers are amazing. What else could be achieved?

I love classical music, there is nothing better on a rainy night to bring the lights down and turn up a Bach Fugue, or maybe listen to the Requiem Mass or even bring out some Debussy.

However nothing gets me more angry than modern classical. I used to dismiss it out of hand as pretentiousness or simply an a-tonal mess. The last performance Cath and I went too started off well but rapidly went downhill. The worst offender was a well-known composer who has had her pieces played around the world. In this piece there were three performers, one on Soprano Sax, one Alto Sax and the other on percussion. They were all facing a projection screen. A movie was projected on the screen of failing pieces of cut out coloured paper and each performer was assigned a colour. They would randomly play notes while their colour was on screen.

Say it with me now: This is not music. It was a hideous mess of random sound, I just felt horribly embarrassed for the performers and the audience. They finished and…everyone applauded.

We had an intermission and Cath was kind enough to let me beg off so I went to the pub and watched the cricket.

While I was sitting there though I got thinking. Is it really their fault? Let’s have a look at some of the music genres around today. Rap was first really performed in the early 1900’s, Rock music? Went mainstream around the 1960’s, was really started though around the 1930-1940’s. Hiphop? Started in the 1970’s! Classical music? That started in 1100. That is over 900 years of music.

In that time we have had some of the greatest artists ever encountered. With that kind of pedigree it would be daunting if not impossible to live up to those standards. When Cath first started writing for her masters and she asked for my advice I was blunt and said I did not enjoy the music she was writing and I asked why she did not write more in the Classical or Romantic era style and the answer was no one writes in that style because it has already been done better than anyone possible could.

So I think that is why we are left with these people writing for random videos or playing the piano with a teddy bear or using a prepared piano.

This is not the road it should be going down. People should be proud of what has been achieved and use it for inspiration for their pieces not simple look at it and conclude you could never be that good. It really smacks of my previous post The Great Leveler.

I could be wrong but I get the feeling that classical music is dying by being its own worst enemy.

What the hell? It’s a polite way of saying that the exams bear little to no relation to real life. If you are administering to a Windows XP box or group you need to understand the basics, fine. But the incredibly obscure questions are so patently bizarre. The problem being these exams are multiple choice as they are all graded by a computer. Fine. However the questions do not judge how good you are at problem solving, if you can tackle problems from multiple angles, the ability to use related knowledge to figure out your problem. No, the exams are mostly questions of such an obscure nature that you never know the answer and you would never NEED to know the answer. Here are a few examples from the 70-291 exam that I am studying for right now:

You need to check the logs for the Routing and Remote Access machine. Where would you find these log files?

Followed by four different path names. Should I know this off the top of my head? Maybe, does this in anyway demonstrate my ability to work effectively administrator to a Server 2003 domain? Of course not.

The amount of these problems which are simple rote memorization is staggering. In real life if you were faced with needing to check log files or which snap in to use, if you don’t recall straight away then grabbing your handy guide book or hitting up google will solve your problem. If you deploy a new DHCP Server onto a separate subnet separated by a router and you do not have a DHCP Relay in place, can you google that? No. These are the sorts of things that should be tested, showing that someone is not only capable of understanding the network but thinking their way around problems.

Add in the fact I am half way through my MSCE and I learnt more on the job in two weeks than I will learning to pass 6 exams.

I wondered how other people handle this having to learn really precise, mostly useless information. So I started digging through the wonders of the internet and found what are called brain dumps. Basically they are collections of the current exam questions with answers. A glossy way of saying cheating. These message board are filled with people vouching for the authenticity of these exams by saying:

Used these collections, passed my exam today, all the questions were on it!

I know cheating has always been a (small) part of exams but this seems to make is it incredibly easy and add in the way these brain dumps are done up they almost seem legitimate.

Ultimately I will get my piece of paper but I don’t feel good about it. Can you tell I have an exam today…? /rant