Mentalechoes

9.15am, friday. I work from home on friday. I’ve had been working for 45 minutes, in a pair of tracksuit pants and a sleeveless shirt, with some lilting psytrance tunes on winamp playing to get me in the mood to do something productive. Then there’s a knock at the front door. Hmmm… who the fuck could that be at this ungodly hour? I open it up and it’s my neighbour from upstairs.

“Do you have any water”?

“Well… I… err…”.

“Because the neighbours downstairs turned it off and they didn’t inform any of us not even a not to say the water was going to be turned off or for how long and then she was so rude to me she went… blah blah blah… water had to be turned off because of the plumber and nobody knew we were all connected… blah blah…”.

I was wondering when she was going to take a breath. Or slow down. But she didn’t look like she was going to do either.

“Some people are just so rude”! She said as she shot a look of pure venom down the staircase at the offending individual.

And with that she headed back up to her own apartment. I was left to ponder what it was all about.

Ten minutes later as I was sitting in front of my computer working once more, I started wondering if it had happened at all, or if I had just had an acid flashback and imagined the whole thing.

Are you sure The Matrix is just a movie?

Andy.

Today after I came home from swimming, instead of being able to sit down to my weekly back to back two hour episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit - my one shamelessly American drama series that I watch slavishly as often as I can - I realised I don’t have television. Oh, I have A television, a big 1080p 42 inch Samsung model, but it’s got no cable plugged into the back of it apart from the xbox media center, and the high end Oppo DVD that upscales dvds to 1080p resolution (shamelessly big plug for my entertainment center there). Yesterday I unplugged my cable television box to mail back to the cable television supplier, in exchange for a new box that will do HDTV. Luckily The Netherlands being completely shit at customer service, I will probably without television for at least the next month. But once again, thanks to the internet, I’ve found a site that does streaming movies through shoutcast; desync.com.

I made dinner and tuned into The Matrix as it was just starting. It’s been ages since I’ve seen that film, and you know what, 10 years (nearly) after it was made, it is still the best love story of all time. No, seriously, it really is. If you think I’m joking, sit down and watch it. The way Trinity brings Neo back to life with a kiss after he was shot dead, jezuz… that brought tears to my eyes nearly. And the way they tear that building apart together when trying to rescue Morpheus was just beautiful. Obviously they don’t lack for common activities they enjoy which gives them something to talk about at the end of the working day. Normally I hate love stories, but The Matrix I can watch again and again and again, and it never grows old. Lord knows, when I grow up I want to be just like Neo! The ultimate man; lover, computer programmer extraordinaire, hacker elite, and looks cool as fuck wearing leather and guns. If The Matrix was real, I could!

Ohhh… but you know, maybe it is!

Andy.

A very good friend of mine from back home whose name I won’t mention (but it begins with L and she lives on the Gold Coast), sent an email out to all in her contacts list, that went something like this:

Hellloooooo everyone,

Just letting you know that I’ve deactivated my Facebook account.

It has simply become boring (Yes, Andy, you were right; I lost interest, LOL!) and a time waster for me, and I really don’t have time to waste right now. Too busy with real life, LOL!

Right, well it was more or less exactly like that! I didn’t want to be accused of misinterpreting her message, so it seemed easier to quote it verbatim to support what I’m going to say next.

Social networking sites are pretty much a waste of time! In fact the term Social Network Fatigue has been coined to describe the chore that these things become when stacked next to each other in your browser tabs, after the initial euphoria is over.

A very few social networks serve a specific purpose that is useful. Business and professional association sites like linkedin.com and plaxo.com are examples. But the vast majority of these social network sites that exist are like fashion fads; look like a lot of fun and are very hip for a while, and then discarded never to be used again. Now before you say, “Facebook” and point to it like it’s the answer to everything great and amazing in the universe of social networks. Look at how finnicky we are with sites like Orkut, and Live Space to name just a few. Their numbers wax and wane like the tides and nobody counts on them being around in six months from now. Nobody with money to invest that’s for sure. But Facebook is an enigma for a social network because it’s worth over 12 billion, but their business model is based on selling 1 dollar vaporware articles. Beats the shit out of a lot of people how that works, me included. For sure though, nobody is going to give you an even bet that in five years from now Facebook will still be around.

The reality with social network sites is that they are all eye candy, with very little substance behind them. For a while they are very flashy and fun, but all too shortly after joining, their real worth becomes evident. Unless they are helping you with finding a job, or staying in touch with people that you actually do know as friends in the real world, they are just one more distraction in a browser full of blinging distractions. Now there is nothing wrong with a little bling bling to give you something new to coo over, and drop into a conversation about cool new stuff you found while browsing around one afternoon at work. But as with all things better described as fads, they never last. So I’m wondering if all these social networks are just something useless on the internet evolutionary ladder on the way to something useful we haven’t seen yet. Sort of like the dodo becoming a chicken. Which of course it did, and they have my thanks for it!

Andy.

Ironically, after writing my last post, I actually came across a couple of online news stories about World of Warcraft addicts; the type of person that spends 16 hours a day, every day, to the exclusion of all else, playing World of Warcraft. It’s this person that actually gives the rest of us internet jocks a bad name, and for those in the know, there is a very big difference between this person, and me, and the people I have as friends, and the people I work with, and the people I cross paths with online.

I will actually admit, that people who get so sucked into a virtual reality setting (like WoW or AoC or LoTRO or EQ2), that they completely ignore anything else in their real life has a big problem. But someone spending 16 hours a day in a game, is not the equivalent of 16 hours online doing other activities. I’m someone that lives on the very bleeding edge of an internet technology lifestyle; I work in a company that operates on the very edge of internet technology and produces the latest in consumer entertainment services; most of my communication, entertainment, news all come from internet based services. In short, I am about 5 - 7 years ahead of the average joe in the burbs. For me being online means socialising; means keeping up with current events; means keeping in touch with my family back in Australia; means finding on what’s on around town; means checking out what’s latest and greatest in new stuff on the internet; and means buying those essential and luxury items from all over Europe, as I try to get the best bargain. It also means from time to time playing some games, but that represents a very small part of what I do online.

So people like me are the evolution of the cash consumer from last century. Eventually everyone is going to have a house connected 24/7 with a flow of information going in and out that will be their interaction to a new world. You can’t fight the digital future, but nor should it be demonised by pointing fingers at those fools who consciously choose to live life in a completely imbalanced way that causes themselves and others around them emotional harm.

In the end it all comes down to living a digital life in the same way you would a real one; everything in moderation, and keeping control of what you do. But just like in real life, some people just can’t do it, and so there will always be hopeless lost causes.

Don’t judge us all that way!

Andy.

I’ve been reading more and more articles in places where I get my news about the scourge of internet addiction! Yes apparently some very prominent - read: very fucking loud no nothing idiot - people in the addiction treatment circles are becoming worried that the internet is destroying lives just as surely as crack, heroin and Jerry Springer reruns. I normally laugh these types of things off, but wired news just ran an article about how one doctor is saying that internet addicts are most likely brain damaged with something akin to asperger’s syndrome!

Basically internet addiction, according to the experts , is something like this:

• Preoccupation with the Internet. (Thoughts about previous on-line activity or anticipation of the next on-line session.)
• Use of the Internet in increasing amounts of time in order to achieve satisfaction.
• Repeated, unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back, or stop Internet use.
• Feelings of restlessness, moodiness, depression or irritability when attempting to cut down use of the Internet.
• On-line longer than originally intended.
• Jeopardized or risked loss of significant relationships, job, educational or career opportunities because of Internet use.
• Lies to family members, therapist, or others to conceal the extent of involvement with the Internet.
• Use of the Internet as a way to escape from problems or to relieve a dysphoric mood. (e.g., feelings of hopelessness, guilt, anxiety, depression.)

Which essentially is me fucked! Hell… I don’t even DO withdrawls anymore because I always have two of the four computers I own permanently online! It’s been this way for about 5 years, so it’s totally normal for me… and all my friends, and the majority of people living in Amsterdam! High speed, low cost bandwidth is as much a part of my life style as is cheap and easily available drugs.

Which makes me wonder who the fuck are these people anyway that decide that this generation of high end internet users are mentally ill? I walk past residential flats of an evening after grocery shopping and I see the same people watching the same mind numbingly boring television shows week in, week out. Now reality TV is socially acceptable and therefore normal. However I play two MMORPGs very regularly, and watch almost no TV (let alone absolute crap reality television), and yet I’m the one about get listed as having a mental disorder (in some Asian countries)!

Which all just makes me wonder, who the fuck decides who’s normal and who’s not anyway! Seriously this could all go like a scene out of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. At some point someone is going to strap me into a chair and give me electric shock therapy to cure me of my Age of Conan enjoyment problem!

Obviously the only reasonable response is for geeks to arm ourselves with military grade weaponry, and defend our homesteads and bandwidth with lethal force! Actually fuck guns, I reckon I could pretty much dual wield one hand axes now after playing my Barbarian character on AoC! The only way someone is going to take my servers away from me is from my cold dead hands! Who’s with me? WHO’S WITH ME?

*sigh*… You know I only got one phone call over the weekend to see if I was up to anything. Maybe I do spend too much time in front of the computer…maybe I should unplug for a while and get outside?

AoC anyone?

Andy.

I think perhaps after nine years living here in The Netherlands that I might actually have been passively integrated into Dutch life. I was watching the UEFA Cup football match between The Netherlands and Romania with genuine excitement and hopeful anticipation that my team would be the winner at the end. This from someone that proudly didn’t know jackshit about football when I first turned up here. Football to me meant rugby league; soccer was a game for girls who couldn’t play rugby league; and The Netherlands definitely wasn’t my home team. Tonight I knew all the names of the players, and could even name the coach. Amazing really because I don’t watch football at all except for UEFA and World Cup, and I defintely don’t watch the sports news, or read the local metro newspapers, so my guess is, it’s something in the cheese!

Now if only I could finish learning dutch language the same way!

Andy.

Truly the benefits of having recently ripped my entire cd collection is beginning to show itself like the bare legs of women on the first warm days of spring. I decided that tonight I would do some work overhauling my weblogs (as once again I’ve decided that writing IS important to me, and I really should write more). Being a person who thinks best when there is some rhythmic electronic beat pulsating in my brain, I fired up me trusty old winamp and scrolled through the collection looking for just that something special. My eye caught Seb Fontaine’s Prototype 1 CD , an absolute classic that came out in 1999, and was the anthem sound to my Y2K new years eve party night, and one that I hadn’t heard in a loooong time. So I loaded it up, and went back to work.

I wasn’t even paying attention to what I was listening to, as I was getting very intense into the work at hand, making everything on my weblogs just so, when I became aware of the hairs on the back of my neck start to rise in some sort of primal way, and feel my lips pull back in a half smile, half frenzied snarl of lust. Some tune was banging out that I couldn’t remember the name to, but at a subconcious level a flood of experiences unlocked and flowed over me!

Wow! For the next 7 minutes I was taken on a ride that was almost orgasmic in its effect! I couldn’t sit still, at one point I got up and started jumping around my computer room like I was back on the dance floor in Si Hall’s flat in the middle of Amsterdam on fuckin new years eve, man! WHOOO HOOO! I could almost feel the exctasy flowing through me once more, and see the laughing faces of the people that were there that night. I closed my eyes at one point and almost, nearly almost, could hear the sounds of the party lilting through my living room, as if I was back there. Ahh, the bliss! A time of love and glory my friends. It was a night to remember, and one that I will take with me for the rest of my days!

The tune happens to be number 7 on the second disc; I Dream - (with Tilt). And even now, nine years after its first debut, I still think this is one of the best progressive electronic compositions ever made! This is one you crank up loud and ride the rush! Mind you, the whole of the second cd is just goddamned fookin amazing, ey! And seriously worth listening to.

This revelation with music is one I have recur in my life at long but regular intervals; I’ll go a year without really feeling intense about anything, and then I’ll have this moment of enlightenment that totally blows me away as I come across an old tune, or music composition that almost makes me cry with pleasure and memory.

I guess that’s what makes the experience so fantastic; to have it fade, and then come upon me again with an intensity that rocks me to the core.

Andy.

I heard it again today at work, this word “Australianism”. The first time I heard it I thought the person was geographically challenged and didn’t know how to say “Australia” properly. But then on hearing it again, I realised that this person was actually trying to tell me something. What, I had no idea, so I asked.

“Australianisms are what you say all the time, and nobody understands you”! Came the reply from the American collegue.

It seems that political correctness has been taken so far, that now the Americans I work with can’t even say to me, “I have no idea what the fuck you just said, can you repeat it please”. But instead invent new politcally correct words that sound pleasant, but are devoid of any meaning, and actually just confuse the shit out of me.

Looks like I’m going to have to add “Australianism” to my list of buzzwords to drop into work conversations where I have no idea what the fuck someone is talking about!

Andy!

So this afternoon, after waking up at the very reasonable hour of 1.30pm, I decided that it was time to do something about backing up my babies. Those being my weblog posts across my numerous weblogs, and my websites, all of which I host at home, on a lovely little server that is something akin to Frankenstein in the PC sense; with a peice taken from this old dead computer, and a peice taken from that old dead computer… you get the idea. Believe it or not, this blog your reading is now over three years old, which is a lot of history really to lose to the inevitable harddrive crash that will happen again, as it has happened to me before. Fortune smiles on us in serendipitus ways, and through another - somewhat technical - blogger I learned of a cheap offsite storage service (called rsync.net for those who are into that sort of thing). Without boring the absolute shit out of you with details, yesterday I signed up for a storage plan, and this afternoon I wrote the backup script that will tuck all my babies into nice compressed beds each and every night and send them all to aunty rsync’s house for safe sleeping. Now if ever the worst should happen, which is definitely the harddisk eating its own head, which can literally happen I’ll have you know, I won’t even shed a tear, much less scream and go on a psychotic rampage with an axe. No, I’ll hack another working part from another computer and transplant it into the server and then replace them babies with a few taps of the fingers. Job done!

All this got me thinking, if only life could be backed up in the same way. Whenever we make mistakes, or we hurt someone, or ourselves; whenever something happens that we just wish hadn’t, wouldn’t it be just great to roll back to the last working version and continue on! Yes I do realise this is just a silly fantasy, but lets just suspend belief and say we could do that for a brief moment, we could roll back our lives to a saved point whenever we screwed up, or life threw us a curved ball we didn’t want to have hit us in the head. You know what the result would be? We’d end up learning nothing, because we only really learn anything when wounds are inflicted, and during the time it takes to heal. Maybe that’s why gawd didn’t give us the backup option in the first place. Because nobody would ever have a life that moved forward, we’d all just be pretty fucked up people from having everything our own way!

Which makes me wonder, is there some deeper meaning in the pain I hadn’t considered yet? This seems to beg for further introspection.

Andy.

I’ve been obsessed the last few nights with trying to get my entire CD collection digitised. I don’t have that many discs, maybe somewhere around 160 I would say, perhaps 10 or 20 more. But they’ve been sitting in a dark closet for the last three years, waiting for a home on a bookshelf that I promised them I would make. Three years on, they are still sitting in a dark closet, actually pretty well protected from light and dust, so they are all still in pristine condition, which I guess is one consolation of them never being used. But then a couple of nights ago I decided I would rip a couple of Moby discs I have because I just had to listen to a couple of my favourite tracks of his, so I decided to rip them to the computer using winamp. Then I figured since I’ve done the Moby cds, I would just rip one or two of The Chemical Brothers discs I had. Thus started what has become an maniacal obsession to rip every single disc that was in that closet.

I’ve been losing sleep over this too. It will get to 1.20am and I will be keenly watching the ripping progress of a cd, saying to myself, I’ll go to bed after this one has finished. And when it’s finished, I have this brief little internal struggle, and then put another cd into the computer, and say again, after this one I’ll definitely go to bed. I literally have to pry myself away from the big cd stack which I’ve made in front of the computer and console myself that they will be still be there tomorrow waiting to become part of the new digital collective.

I have discovered two things about myself while undertaking this project: -1- I have really great taste in music, and if I didn’t know me and I visited my flat and saw my music collection, I would be totally impressed and want to be friends with me so I could borrow stuff. And -2- I might be slightly obsessive compulsive, which would probably explain a whole lot of bizarre behaviour that women in my life put down to “personality quirks”. When it’s done I will be both happy that I’ve got all of my cds part a shiney new digital library I can listen to anywhere, and sad because I will have run out of cds to rip. Then I’m going to have to find something else to obsess about.

Andy.