Technology and society

I was supposed to call someone yesterday, but I didn't get around to it. I figured I'd get to it this morning, but I didn't manage that, either. At last I had a few moments to breathe as I sat down on the train to Tel Aviv. I looked at my phone and realized that I was almost out of battery. Deciding that it wasn't a good idea to use the last of the battery on a phone call that might not last long enough to say anything important, I thought I should send an sms instead. Short, quick, and interruptionless.

But then I stopped myself.

Once upon a time, if you wanted to read a book or a short story by one of your favorite authors, you either had to borrow the book from a library or a friend or else you had to go buy it in a store. The key in any of those options is that you had to be physically in the same place as the book. If you lived in a country where that book hadn't yet been published, you may never get to see it. If the book had gone out of print, it might be very difficult to find a copy of the book. These days, you can read out of print books as well as numerous new works by great authors online.

No, don't you go sniffing the dog. The dog's name is Sniff. And he's a combination of really cool and really scary. Cool because, well, I like technology and you can do some really cool things with this dog. I mean, seriously. Scary because, well, you are sticking an RFID reader and a bunch of RFIDs in the hands of your KID. Let's see, can we think of a nefarious way to use that?

I have been having troubles since I started doing development for embedded software with the amount of available space in my /opt directory. You see, normally, you put all of your cross-compilers and software development kits (sdk's) underneath the /opt directory. Unfortunately, when I set up my laptop and partitioned the hard drive, I didn't set /opt into its own partition and so it was sitting in the root (/) partition.

I am hugely inspired by this five minute talk about Humblefacturing. This is exactly the sort of stuff that's been going through my mind in the last few months, but he takes it a few steps past what I was even imagining.

This will be the home of a Wave experiment. Muahahahahah!