Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Thank You, Facebook

For allow­ing me to be spoon-fed my opin­ions via a invit­a­tion sys­tem where I can be bom­barded daily with appeals from parties right, left and centre want­ing to induct me into their neatly com­part­ment­al­ised mind­set. For mak­ing it so easy for people who think I might be vaguely inter­ested in sup­port­ing their beliefs to invite me, along with whatever other unfor­tu­nate souls hap­pen to be con­nec­ted to them, to join their I-wear-my-opinons-on-my-sleeve Facebook Group, because remem­ber: if you said it on Facebook, It Can Really Make a Difference.

A Three-Step Plan for Facebook Groups
1. Get to know me first, so you have some vague idea as to my beliefs and opin­ions. Want to know what I think? Ask me.
2. Don’t bother invit­ing me any­way. Unless your Group is incred­ibly witty, chances are I’m not inter­ested. My join­ing a Facebook Group is not going to influ­ence who becomes the next US President; it is not going to stop war in the Middle East, and it sure as fuck isn’t going to resolve the cur­rent AUT strike.
3. Should I — for some unima­gin­able reason — decline your invit­a­tion, have a guess at what the most annoy­ing thing you could do would be. That’s right, invit­ing me again. Please die.

For those unsure who this applies to, fol­low this simple test: Are you con­tent to select your polit­ical stance from a drop-down list of eight options? If you answered Yes, you have a career wait­ing for you as a Facebook Group spammer.

</rant>

Soundtracking Life

As I’ve been read­ing a lot of HST lately, it was only a mat­ter of time before I came across Where Were You When The Fun Stopped?, a com­pil­a­tion by the man him­self. It con­tains some real gems, both favour­ites of his and influ­en­tial tunes from his times. Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and of course Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” are but two examples. If you’ve seen the 2003 doc­u­ment­ary “Breakfast with Hunter S. Thompson”, these will no doubt be famil­iar, as the soundtrack to it is almost identical to this album.

Anyway, it got me think­ing. So my ques­tion is this: what pieces of music would you choose if you were to choose a com­pil­a­tion album of your life? We are but young, so let’s say six tracks — an EP of sorts. Or how­ever many — my first attempt pro­duced 24. Answers as com­ments, let’s hear ‘em. Bonus points if you can think of a snappy title for the disc as well. The tracks don’t neces­sar­ily have to be favour­ites of yours, they can be rep­res­ent­at­ive. Or whatever.

Revision time sac­ri­ficed: 90 mins (1 hr to choose, 30 mins to order). Yes, I am a student.

Where Are We Going, And Why Are We In This Handbasket?

1. Rage Against The Machine — Without a Face (Live)
2. Pennywise — Society
3. Tsunami Bomb — 20 Going On…
4. Million Dead — Breaking the Back
5. Eve 6 — How Much Longer?
6. New Bomb Turks — Wrest Your Hands
7. The Vines — 1969
8. The Doors — Roadhouse Blues
9. Death in Vegas — GBH
10. Moke — Down
11. Eric Clapton — Cocaine
12. Runaways UK — Momentum
13. Jack Johnson — F-Stop Blues
14. Radiohead — Go To Sleep
15. The Stone Roses — This Is The One
16. Soundgarden — Black Hole Sun
17. Powderfinger — JC
18. The Living End — Closing In
19. Bloc Party — So Here We Are
20. Audioslave — The Last Remaining Light
21. Hybrid — Altitude [Red Square Reprise]

wpStats 2.1

After a few days tinker­ing I’ve released my 2.1 ver­sion of wpStats, hot on the heels of Joe’s 2.0 ver­sion which included my hacks.

New in 2.1 is a revised approach to web crawl­ers, some clean­ing up of the stats report­ing, and a few new sec­tions added to the stats pages. The plu­gin now detects hits from a load of other crawlers/bots as well.

Full changelog over at binslashbash.org, along with the down­load.

wpStats Development

I went hunt­ing for WordPress plu­gins the other morn­ing and, among other things, came across the excel­lent wpStats by Joe Newing. This awe­some plu­gin col­lects vis­itor stats and dis­plays some detailed ana­lysis of vis­itor loc­a­tions, browsers, OSs, pages vis­ited, and search bots.

I thought of a few hacks that would improve the plu­gin, which I sub­mit­ted to the author, hop­ing that some­thing of mine might get included in the next release. He respon­ded by mak­ing me “offi­cial hacker”/developer of the pro­ject, as he unfor­tu­nately has little time to work on it.

So, in the next few days I hope to be pub­lish­ing my latest work on wpStats — mainly extend­ing its fea­tures. Lucky for me the area of stats col­lec­tion has great poten­tial, so I should be able to keep think­ing of improve­ments to make :-).

In the mean­time, why not check out the most excel­lent cur­rent release of wpStats, right here.

This Doesn’t Prove Shit

The BBC repor­ted this even­ing with some gusto that the US Justice Department had released “the first video” of the impact that took place at the Pentagon on the morn­ing of September 11^th 2001, thanks to a Freedom of Information request by Judicial Watch. In 2002 stills from another Pentagon secur­ity cam­era claimed to show the same, but were of low qual­ity and failed to really clear up any­thing. Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton was quoted as say­ing, “finally, we hope that this video will put to rest the con­spir­acy the­or­ies involving American Airlines Flight 77.” Regrettably, it fails to do so.

The still below linked here is taken from the BBC stream of the video — the source cam­era, like the pre­vi­ously released stills, is of low fram­er­ate; this is the only frame con­tain­ing whatever it was that impacted with the Pentagon.

What annoyed me as much as the treat­ment of this release as some­thing con­clus­ive was the tone of the art­icle, which reminded me of every offi­cial response to crit­ical art­icles writ­ten about the incid­ent. Theories have long cir­cu­lated about what happened at the Pentagon, and regard­less of what the offi­cial line is and what is branded as “con­spir­acy the­ory” are the facts — that the dam­age at the Pentagon was not con­sist­ent with an impact by a 757, illus­trated (among other things) by the com­plete lack of vis­ible debris. Okay, so per­haps this can be explained away; why then, if this is so, has the US gov­ern­ment not released the other video and pho­to­graphic mater­ial record­ing the incid­ent, namely the private sur­veil­lance cam­eras at the hotel near the Pentagon (con­fis­cated by the FBI after the attack) and at the pet­rol sta­tion across from the Pentagon. National Geographic News repor­ted in December 2001 that “Velasquez [the owner] says the gas station’s secur­ity cam­eras are close enough to the Pentagon to have recor­ded the moment of impact. “I’ve never seen what the pic­tures looked like,” he said. “The FBI was here within minutes and took the film.”” The author­it­ies have never released these images which, logic argues, should surely show the true events of that morning.

This is no won­der, how­ever, when blinkered atti­tudes like those pre­val­ent in the United States still exist. In 2002 French author Theirry Meyssan released two books attempt­ing to give an object­ive explan­a­tion of what he believed were the real events at the Pentagon, namely that what impacted there could not have been a 757 but was instead a smal­ler plane or mis­sile, or the dam­age was caused by a truck bomb at the site. Leaping aboard the American insti­tu­tion of anti-French sen­ti­ment, Pentagon spokes­man Glen Flood described the book as “a slap in the face and real offence to the American people”. To me it seems that this men­tal­ity has become the norm when deal­ing with issues like this — com­plete rejec­tion of the pos­sible altern­at­ive story sug­ges­ted by the “con­spir­acy the­or­ists” because the rami­fic­a­tions of it being true are so mind-meltingly huge that civil­isa­tion as we know it would implode. The aver­age American, des­pite being faced with over­whelm­ing evid­ence to the con­trary, simply refuses to even enter­tain the pos­sib­il­ity that what happened could be any dif­fer­ent from the offi­cial ver­sion of events.

The release of this video does not help to shore up the defence of the offi­cial story. It should not be treated as such. The other evid­ence of the events at the Pentagon that is still being sup­pressed needs to be released. I don’t like the offi­cial story; I don’t like the implic­a­tions if one of the other the­or­ies turns out to be true. I don’t claim to know either way, but I and mil­lions of oth­ers want to see that other footage.

Yes, what happened at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11^th was an atro­city in every way. Yes, the loss of human life was hor­rific and ter­rible, and should never be for­got­ten. But that is not a reason to refuse to ques­tion what went on. Those who sug­gest altern­at­ive the­or­ies are not try­ing to insult the dead. They are only try­ing to find the truth.

US releases 9/11 Pentagon video, BBC News, 16÷5÷2006
Why Pentagon released 9/11 tape, BBC News, 16÷5÷2006
The Suppression of Video Footage of the Pentagon Attack, 911research.com
Three Months On, Tension Lingers Near the Pentagon, National Geographic News, 11/12/2001