I Hate Trophies

I hate the idea of people displaying useless objects whose only function is to say "Look how good I am - look what I did," to everyone, most of all themselves.
Hunting trophies, sports trophies, hell - even diplomas framed and displayed.
If you don't know your worth without narcissistic reminders, you may have a self-esteem problem. I don't want to be defined by a shelf full of platitudes.

Then I look at what's on my shelf, and I realise that my trophies are books.
Jesus - even DVDs.
"This is what has been pumped through my head."
"This is what resonates with my mind."
Fuck.
"This is me."
I don't leave behind books I don't like because I think I won't read them again (though I won't) or keep ones I like because I think I will (though I do). (Wow 9 I's in that sentence. Who's the narcissist?) I keep or discard books based on whether what was in them has become a part of me. Or if I just haven't gotten around to reading them yet.

I can be as smug as I want labelling myself as unlabellable, and yet all I have to do is look at the shelf above my desk to find an autobiographical summary that's both shorter and longer than most any book you'd care to name.

Is that profound? Tell me that's profound?

I'm fighting the urge to point out that last line is supposed to be ironic.
And losing.
I guess that one cuts too close.

And no, I'm not about to throw out my diplomas, my old awards or my books. Fuck off.
Go read a book.

When the chips are down

IMGP3196
Originally uploaded by Fush.

I like this photo.
It shows the futility of trying to see yourself from the outside. All you get is a distorted, blurry picture of what you might look like, and lose all perspective on what you are doing. Meanwhile, everyone else fades into the background and becomes unrecognisable.

Or maybe it just shows why you should hold the camera steady if you're not using a flash.

That's me on the right - I'm holding the camera. Then it's Craig, Aida, and I think a bit of Bec's foot. Around an improvised poker table.

See the joke?

See the joke?
Originally uploaded by Fush.

Craig and his Crab

22nd bday1
Originally uploaded by Fush.

Sorry Craigus, but this photo's just too good not to share with the world.
And it serves to test the link between flickr and blogger, so it's useful too.

Snickle Dippenfricken

Software integration testing...

Just experimenting at the moment - I've installed Flock and I'm trying to integrate it with Flickr. We'll see if it works.

Nope. The Flickr topbar won't load my photos. Damn it.

If you're reading every day, you should be writing every day.

That's something John Smart said at Accelerating Change 2004. I didn't go, since I live in Australia, but I downloaded the podcast. They're all available from ITConversations, and essential if you're interested in where technology and humanity's headed.
Combine that with the wisdom gleaned from Tom Clancy's Executive Orders of

If you didn't write it down, it didn't happen.

and you have a great argument for starting a blog. So that's what I'm doing.

I'm sitting here sipping my cappucino outside Victoria Markets and pondering the meaning of life. Ever since I started thinking about the Singularity maybe sixteen months ago, everthing else I do and think about, and that everyone else does and thinks about, seems less important. More petty. I don't need a bigger TV, I don't care if a bunch of guy can put a ball through a goal slightly more often than another bunch of guys, and I sure as hell dont car what 'everyone' is wearing this season. 150,000 people die every day, and countless more are starving, sick or otherwise suffering. I can't quite commit to Yudkowsky's Interim Meaning of Life yet, but I'm getting there. (That may not be the doc the Interim meaning came from, but it's a damn good read. I'll do more than skim it one of these days)

My train of thought was just sidetracked for a while there by some girls at the next table talking about frypans as wedding presents, and a girl who's getting married because she's pregnant.

There's just not enough time to pay enough attention to enough information streams. But that's the key to intelligence anyway - information destruction. What Doug Hofstadter calls focusing and filtering in Gödel, Escher, Bach. This is the greatest non-fiction book I've ever read. Thanks, Craig. Now read it yourself. I don't remember where 'information destruction' comes from, but filtering is a big focus of modern AI, and rightly so. You can't do much with masses of raw data. That's why we invented graphs.
So consolidate/coagulate/precipitate (not skim) the important information out, and dispose of the rest if you have limited memory, or archive it if you have an infinite store. I can't wait for lifelogging. You just need a decent interface (LUI) to access it and some really decent search and filtering capability to find what you want. I just had to go through the same thing finding where I got the John Smart quote - I couldn't remember which podcast it came from so I had to just listen to three of them. Very inefficient. It's great to listen to them again, but it's hard to pay attention to a podcast while you're typing. Once again, too many streams, too little time.
Anyway, you could run a constant stream now from a Vaio or something with a webcam and a wireless link, but you'd have to put some serious effort into cataloguing it if it was going to be useful as anything other than a curiosity. In any case, I recokon I'll get myself a camera/pda phone one of these days so I can blog some photos. At the moment I don't even have a digital camera. Sigh.

This is just a reminder to myself to read this book (recommended by John Smart).
Eric Caisson - Cosmic Evolution