category: introspection

The new Google AdSense Terms and Conditions behoove me to have a privacy policy, and it's about time. This document may change as the site and my situation does, but its spirit will remain the same. Laws change and I'm the type of guy that likes to roam around, I'm never in one place I roam from town to town, And when I find myself a-fallin' for some girl I hop right into that car of mine and ride around the world, Yeah I'm the wanderer yeah the wanderer, I roam around around around... so sometimes the law I'm subject to will require changes to this policy.

For the purposes of this document: 'I' means Strix, the owner and operator of this site. 'You' means you, the person reading this. 'The Software' means the collection of code powering strix.org.uk and its associated domains. 'The Site' means strix.org.uk and www.strix.org.uk. 'Douchebag' means Joel Osteen, Myanmar Premier General Than Shwe and any corporate legal or PR representative. This policy applies to human users of The Site I reasonably believe to be acting in good faith. Spammers, spam, associtated robots, Douchebags and any person engaging in illegal activites of which I disapprove are not protected by this policy. For example: a citizen of the Maldives quoting from the Bible is breaking the law of his home territory, but will still be protected by Strix.org.uk wherever possible.

Please note that strix.org.uk uses Google AdSense, and Google collects and stores a great deal of information about your travels on the web so as to better target ads to you and for this Site.

Protection of Personal Information

Freedoms of Speech

To answer the question humans as a species would first need to agree on what it is to be human, and that'll never happen. Identities and views of life are too diverse (and often deeply irrational). For all that, googling the phrase "makes us uniquely human" turns up a bunch of answers:

"logical thinking" - Terrence Real

"laughter" - Greg Thomas

"an insatiable thirst to know and explore the unknown" - Yasha Husain

"the ability to reproduce tempo and turn it into music" - Dolora Zajick

"thinking" - Donald C. Storm

"[how] the mind is set up in all kinds of organic and experiential ways to sort and select, edit and remember or discard" - Prokofy Neva

"our dualism: our understanding that there are material objects, or bodies, and people, or souls" - paraphrasing Paul Bloom

"language" - Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

"the right prefrontal cortex" - Donald Stuss

"our ability to imagine the future" - D T Brookes

"our individuality - the ability to go consciously against the 'herd'" - Geoffrey Falk

"the capacity for thought and collective debate and action." - Eva Cox

"our capacity for self-awareness" - Jim Dryden

"transcendent longing to escape from nature" - Peter Lawler

"capacity for a loving relationship with our Heavenly Father" - Center Point Society

"ability for complex imitation" - Beth Azar

"[revealed by] the small differences between our genome and those of other animals" - Svante Pääbo

"early human prehistory" - Bob Gleichauf

"our ability to communicate" - Jan-Michelle Sawyer

"passion and spirit" - Pb Fisher

"the tension between mind and body" - Laurie Hassold

"our ability to add personal perspective to all things" - Gina Lawton

"poker" - Ask Kate

"[a] complex emotional repertoire" - Professor Solomon

The Digerati Life recently ran a fascinating article on name discrimination, and how the name you choose for your child could affect their prospects in job and housing markets. On the one hand, name seems a terribly shallow, arbitrary and completely unfair way to judge people. On the other, racism aside, I can see how name may affect hiring decisions.

The popularity of different names vary over time and according to socioeconomic status (say, Britneys born around y2k or Marilyns in the 50s) so at the very least a name says something about the group of people with that name, and may hint at ones parents values. Suppose an employer receives 100 equally qualified resumes, has time to interview ten people, preferring a female for the job. Customers generally like and like being around attractive people, so all else being equal the employer is imagining an attractive, poised, professional-looking person with a musical voice and an air of efficiency. Not imagining an overweight person with coarse accent, grating voice, ugly shoes and tent-like floral print dress.

Cut to Google facial recognition search for: Dolores, Bertha, Regina and Jessica, Kayleigh, Summer. A Rose by any other name would probably be fuglier, which surprised me.

A name doesn't say anything conclusive about an individual but the employer does not have time to throughly evaluate all the applicants and is forced to gamble with interview time, so stereotypes and generalizations may be used to estimate odds.

Even more interesting, research shows that names affect people's view of themselves as reflected by other peoples expectations of them. Teachers, for instance, could not help forming impressions of students before meeting them based solely on their name.

Link: Name Discrimination! How It Affects Job and Career Choices, Life Status, Overall Success.

It's good to be called Stricky, no-one has an abusive ex or was beaten up in school by someone with my name. It's completely unusual, few presuppositions can be formed based on it, and its near impossible to remember first time round, which suits me. Spell checkers highlight it in documents and spambots and data miners probably don't have it in their 'male first names' database. So I'm not sure I agree with the reports recommendation to give your kids 'normal', white-sounding names.

The Yazidi are a sect of Yazdanism, also known as the Cult of Angels, a pre-Islamic Kurdish religion, sharing some common mythology with other middle-eastern religions - Judaism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity. Wikipedia describes their creation story:

The tale of the Yazidis' origin found in the Black Book gives them a distinctive ancestry and expresses their feeling of difference from other races. Before the roles of the sexes were determined, Adam and Eve quarreled about which of them provided the creative element in the begetting of children. Each stored their seed in a jar which was then sealed. When Eve's was opened it was full of insects and other unpleasant creatures, but inside Adam's jar was a beautiful boy-child. This lovely child, known as son of Jar grew up to marry a houri [pure/heavenly/delightful being] and became the ancestor of the Yazidis. Therefore, the Yazidi are regarded as descending from Adam alone, while other humans are descendants of both Adam and Eve.

Did you know: there are several towns and cities across the United States called Woonsocket? It's like the City Fathers all got drunk on mead one day and had a contest for weirdest city name ever. The word is widely believed (by me) to be Nipmuc Indian for 'I will kill you and steal your horse, paleface'.

Pioneer captain Jeremiah 'Lucky' Pierre, addressing captured braves: 'You are defeated, you will now convert to Christianity and serve your new masters in the name of God, or die. Tell me, what do you savages call this place.'
Chief Ravenous Beaver: 'Wo oon sok k ket'

Which would explain Woonsocket, RI, the city whose motto is (no fooling) 'the most French place in the United Sates outside of Louisiana.' which I guess is in their favor. Apparently it's a nice place too, because the good people of Woonsocket, South Dakota named their town after it. New York was originally called New Amsterdam. There's New Orleans, New England, New Jersey, New Hampshire and so on. There's even a Paris in Arkansas. Some homesick fellow in the wild west must have had grand designs to found a new and beautiful city to rival the might and splendor of home, he would create his homeland afresh in foreign lands and it would be called: New Woonsocket (cue trumpets).

I don't really get the process behind place names in general. Consider New Mexico. Did American troops look at the battered country across the border after the Mexican-American War and think to themselves, 'Yeah, we should have one of those, the world needs another Mexico'?

For what it's worth, in case you think I'm picking unfairly on Woonsocket for having a funny name - as opposed to say Hygiene, Colorado or Santa Claus, Indiana [Google Maps] - westerners have trouble pronouncing my home town.

Link: Woonsocket City Website

See? This is why I don't want children. We could probably replace the baked beans with a bowl of mice and and this pudgy-fingered gobbling monstrosity would scarf 'em down. And then he'd say something cutesy and midwestern with a scary grin on his face.

Halloween is fast approaching (October already, where did this year go?) and there's going to be the usual business with kids dressed up as ghosts and monsters coming round the house and throwing eggs. They will have been turfed out of their own homes by their parents so that they might learn an important lesson in life: If you want something from a stranger, put on the scariest demeanour you can, then go round his house with your buddies and make a threat. Offer your hapless victim a choice between vague misfortune and giving you what you want. Playing is how we learn :-) Fine, good, so long as they're having fun.

It is kind of cool that this sort of thing is so stereotyped, that society in general makes up the most absurd things for kids to be afraid of. Overdone icons like plastic spiders and bats aren't scary, and we tell kids they are. In every other Scooby-Doo episode and TV Halloween special kids told, over and over, that they're expected to be afraid of spooOOOOooky stuff. Which is good, because that means we're not exposing kids to things that are actually scary. If I ever see a little girl dressed up as 'rape' for Halloween I'll know the ruse is coming undone.

Garfield's Jim Davis explains:

'Ghosts aren't scary...' he told me before explaining that before writing the strips he went around to everyone he knew and asked them what truly scared them. The answer he got most often was 'being alone' or 'dying alone'.

I need to get out of this rut.

I'm studying Mind Performance Hacks by Ron Hale-Evans. Unlike more traditional brain hacking books (Brain hacking for Axe Murderers, The Zombie's Guide to Hacking Brains, Brain Hacking for Dummies) this one focuses on the needs of Mad Scientists, assuming an intelligent reader with limitless megalomania. It provides memory techniques for tasks such as quickly memorizing long strings of binary code - so you're never without your doomsday computer virus, even if the Justice League destroy your secret headquarters and all your storage media.

It provides many brilliant techniques for streamlining work processes, record keeping, brainstorming, note taking and keeping vast quantities of information in your head without forgetting any. The most interesting chapter so far covers Speedwords (Rapmotz), an auxiliary langue - similar purpose to Esperanto - that's very easy to learn and designed around simple, clear expression of ideas.

It's a lot like Newspeak in syntax and implementation, but where Newspeak was supposed to limit speakers ability to think or articulate unorthodox thoughts Speedwords focuses on the efficient processing and communication of ideas. I intend to be fluent in it in a week.

I may even make it the official language of the New Humanist World Order when I get around to taking over the world. In a similar vein, Unitarianism will be the official religion of the world government. By way of a want ad, I have already chosen my cabinet but there are many important positions to be filled. We will need, for instance, a Prelaetor of Microbiology and a Secretary for the Peoples Republic of Sark.

People sometimes ask me why I wish to take over the world, after all; dictatorships have a habit of sticky endings, often involving a lot of unpleasant shooting. Don't worry, I have most of the details worked out.

I make a lot of websites, most of them I think look OK, they could all be better. I've no training in web design, didn't do art past junior school (and *sucked* at it), but you learn a few things from trial and error, and the usual experiences of life. One of the things I've learned is that it's best to avoid using complimentary colors, say blue and yellow, except for very loud logos and advertisements. I've also learnt not to use serifs on very small text, and that the Google logo is a masterful bit of advertising because by having so many colors it fights with almost any conceivable page you might put it on, thus drawing attention to itself. So I pay attention, but I still dont know very much about graphic design. High time I did some reading on the subject. Google up one set of results for 'graphic design principles':

First result: Huh. Links turn yellow. Yellow on blue. Less than wonderful looking font. Oddly disconnected centered title. Reminds me of geocities in the 1990s. Ugly pixelly graphics. At best, this is likely to be a bunch of reading that teaches me to make sites that look like this. Moving along....

Second result: And it's about.com, a library of articles around all manner of subjects. Looks OK too. Bookmarked for later.

Third result: Blue on orange this time, but it's only one link. Looks better than the first result, but no real information here. Oh well.

Fourth result: It's a company, selling web design services. The eye is drawn to a pull quote in the middle of the page... 'Rob Frankel, the number one guru for branding says, ''Doing it yourself works for suicide.'' '. Yeah. Tasteful. Worse, I think its meant to be a joke. These people sure know how to design a page that embodies the expert, professional nature of their service. And they use Microsoft FrontPage, so they must be pros. Next.

Fifth result: Wow that's bad! Red on blue this time. And I quote: '1. Skim over the basic elements of the 'CRAP Principles' in Williams and then reread my ''Summarizing the CRAP Principles'' below.' If I made that up, people wouldn't believe me. This is the fifth result on Google? Though I didn't read further, its clear they've used all their crap principles on this one. Red bevelled buttons, text all bold and underlined, more red buttons that don't match the others. Enough of this now.

If these are the experts, I don't need to know. I'm beginning to suspect the upper echelons of the design community are like the upper echelons of the art community, a bunch of windy overblown monkeys spouting on about paradigms and such in a way that means nothing to anyone except themselves. Thinking... if you were an expert that was going to teach the world graphic design from a website, wouldn't you make it a good looking website, so people might belive that you understood how its done? At the very least? There are millions of beautifully made sites on the web, template shops (like this and this) are a good place to find a lot of them together and compare. I'm going to go study those instead.

meh.

I just finished listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything podcast about the Poetica Vaginal project, where a bunch of intellectuals from several universities got together to beam recordings of human vaginal contractions into space as a sort of SETI art project.

I haven't blogged in ages, or updated my site. In fact, I haven't done a single thing with it since the Yahoo! showdown that saw the most popular section of this website shut down. So to those of you who came for the the Launch scripts: they're gone, sorry. They're no longer available and I'm not giving the source out, I dont have the resurces to take on a big corporation in court.

So I've been wondering what I should do with this blog. People read it, but what's it for? I might say that personal blogs are a way to share your thoughts with others, to participate in online culture, to connect - whatever that means. Isn't it more like putting up a little shrine to yourself? I dunno. Seems kinda egotistical, maybe thats not a bad thing.

I came across an old conversation in an internet archive, me as a young teenager trying to score some ketamine. A naive and stupid thing to do, but hey. Of course I had no idea I wasn't anonymous, even back then I'd taken some basic steps to protect my identity, and I didn't know that internet chats are logged and kept. I got over the experimenting-with-substances phase pretty quickly, and I never did try Vitamin K - also known as cat tranqiliser, 'coz thats what vets use it for - but there it is. Permanent, indelible evidence of yours truly trying to set up an international drug deal. Bugger.

So what about this blog? Anyone who knows me in the real world can probably find it. My employer, family, girls I might want to meet. And future employers? In a world where everything you write is stored forever my opinions on hacking, pornography, politics and any number of shady areas are only a background check away. What happens in 30 years when my nices and nephews can read this? Will I be as embarrassed as I was when I found that old chat transcript?

Ah screw it, I dont have that many secrets anyway. So welcome back to the new strix.org.uk, I think I'm going to up the content, add pictures and cut back on the introspection. Let the bullshit begin...

Something that's always bugged me a little are the censorship functions on search engines, those righteous little options with names like 'Family Filter' or 'Safe Search'. Little munchkin hats for search engines to tip at puritans. I dont think it's good to blinker people so that they can maintain a fantasy of living in some 1950s white picket fence world, better to expose people to the real world so they can love life for what it really is.

Anyhoo, so I wrote a script to search both with and without the family filtering, and then return only those results that are 'potentially offensive'. I was amazed. Google's SafeSearch(tm) is one wacky piece of kit. Offensive inappropriate pages it's protecting people from include The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, The UN International Court of Justice and this Wikipedia article about kittens. There were also a few consipracy kook sites about secret government censorship, happy crazy irony there, slightly more profound, the Feminists Against Censorship was taken out of the 'safe' results. Hmmm...

Of course, the script has practical uses as well, it produces near perfect adult searches, uncluttered by irrelvant vanilla stuff. Just the thing when you're googling for... um... treasure. Porntastic!

script here. go play...

The lights went out tonight. 10:30, the whole island blacked out. I put on some shoes and went outside. It was perfect. In that moment, moving silently between the shadows I felt completely centred. I could wish it was the end of civilisation and the lights would never come on. Everything was right. I knew in some primitive way how to act, how to move. Unseen, alert, aware. I also knew how I could have felt, running, leaping between uncertain footholds in the dark, hard ragged breath, tired, bruised muscles. Scratched and dirty. Half starving. Bare feet and hands, propelling myself through the bush. Eyes straining at dark shapes as I run. Somewhere deep inside my mammalian brain, below the noise of my inner voice and the complex, self referential thoughts of ego and identity, is an animal that wants to hunt.

Summer is here! It's wet and rainy and awesome. Surfing, beach parties, topless sunbathing. Of course, none of there things are happening at my house so I'm moving down the camp site until further notice. So call me on my cell phone, not my land line. Bye.

I got BoingBoinged! Sweet! I'm getting exposure and a metric crapload of traffic. So, this is the face I make while professing undying gratitude to Xeni Jardin: 8->

Trackbacks:

http://www.boingboing.net/
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/
http://google.blognewschannel.com/
http://www.limeyinbermuda.com/
http://blog.outer-court.com/
http://pmm.typepad.com/planet_multimedia/
http://in-out.upper.jp/
http://chilidog.blogsome.com/
http://skytg24.blogs.com/

Kick Ass! Thank you all.

Yeah! Whooo! There is this most kickass electrical storm going on outside. It's out in the sea to the southwest, clear, dark night with a big cumulus clouds rolling in towards the island, kicking off sheet lightning up and down the front, disappearing in and out of the thunderheads, lighting them up. It was a perfect moment, standing ot in a field at the top of the cliffs, grass up to my knees whipped up by this warm dry wind the storm was pulling into it, drinking a warm can of Bav NA (a Dutch non-alcoholic beer, I'm about the only person I know who likes it), dark sky overhead, lighthouses behind me and to my left, and these amazing shapes lit up in the clouds. Awesome.

Wa-Hey! Another beautiful Saturday on Alderney. Sunshine and fog, was just out taking photos of trees in the wierd light. And I met a new girl today, always a nice surprise. All the pick-up artists I've studied are adament about the three second rule, that is, if you see an attractive girl, you have a three seconds in which to start your approach, he who hesitates being lost. Altogether I must have taken about 20 to esablish that they weren't day trippers, clear my head and snap into character. She was with an older woman, probably her mom, and they were carrying groceries, enough for a fair long while. I took the tack of 'Hey! Welcome to the Island!', body language, tonality and eye contact were more or less where I wanted them, invited them to a party later on. I doubt they'll show, but that's fine, I'm happy with how my technique and inner game are progressing. I've been working on first impressions for the past fornight or so and it's good to have opportunities to practice, I have met *lots* of tourists this past few weeks.

Guernsey was an eye opener, I went there on Wednesday to get my arm sorted out. I'd barely stepped off the plane and there were are half dozen girls in the the arrivals hall, cute girls, who I'd never seen before, more new faces than I'd met in the past six months. I tried a couple test approaches, mostly on principle and for practice, it didn't go down very well. I hadn't slept and my arm still hurt like crap, so my congruence wasn't there and I wasn't at a good place in my head, still a good experience, noting negtive body langue and watching assumed rapport fail. Valuable lessons. Also good to prove to myself that I can take a few failed approaches and go straight into another unaffected, something I wouldn't have been able to do six months ago.

I took some time out at the hospital to check myself out in the mirror, body language, a couple facial expressions, and they looked fine to me, but they weren't working like they normally do, wich I guess proves that at some unconcious level girls are very astute to false body language, and faking it as much as I was causes some subtle inconsistency that freaks them out. On the way there I met this girl and got about five lines into conversation, but she was just being polite, so I raised the gambit of telling her I was going in for a vasectomy (which should usually be a good hook) and made a couple of jokes about it. Nothing, completely wooden expression. No smile, no giggling, no shift in posture, didn't even move her feet. Which I guess goes to show that you cannot fake that naughty-happy-confident state girls are attacted to. I was back on form by the next afternoon with my arm fixed, lesson learnt.

All considered, it was very liberating to hit on these girls in Guernsey and fail with absolutley no consequence. It was completely win-win, I'd succeed and learn something, or I'd fail and learn something, and never see them again. It was fun. On Alderney everyone knows everything everyone else does, so if I did something stupid and screwed up with an island girl, not only have I burned a bridge, but all the other chicks will know about it, so I can't repeat the experiment, or try anything too often. From the air, Alderney looks tiny small :-)

Hey, welcome to the new server. This website is now powered by Debian Linux. In other news I'd like to say ''OW! SWEET (cat juggling) OLSEN TWINS! DAMMIT, FOR THE LOVE OF BENJI THAT HURTS!'' I got up just now at 3am to do... 3am stuff. Anyways I fell over and put my shoulder out. So now I can't sleep and it's like 5 hours before the quack shop opens and I can get it fixed. Oh well, at least I fixed the music videos. Time for an all-night Futurama marathon methinks.

I'm happy. I'm feeling glad. I've got sunshine, in a bag even. And a Gorillaz CD. Been working on a credit card processor for an ISP on the mainland, implementing a system called Protx. Fun project, quite a lot of content knowlege to pick up so it's been a learning curve. Complex objects moving in precise patterns. The sort of thing I like to make. As always, a lot going on, white out over the Channel. In local news, the States has introduced poultry lisences (like dog lisences, not sure if you have to have you're chicken's name on the little brass tag or not).

Been quietly practicing mirroring the breathing of customers in the bar as I'm serving them. Part of a rapport technique I'd like to learn. Pretty crap at it so far, getting better. It's easier with smokers and people lighter on their frame. Did you know women get all uncomfortable and awkward if you stare at their navel? They do, no matter how discreet you think you are, they notice. Takes some getting better at. :-)

Making an effort not to get bent out of shape by Valentines Day. Like I need a reminder that today would have been 4 years with my ex. Valentines Day sucks. All shop windows and television specials and commercials of happy sexy people. Valentines Day sucks. I don't feel lonely or inadequate or unloved any other day of the year. Valentines Day sucks. I look around at this bleak vista of grey February days, pale overweight British women. Crude, agressive yobs swearing and shouting on a Monday night, pushing each other, hoping to start a fight. All anger and thoughtlessness, drunk, uncaring, futile and without ambition. Drawn teenage girls pushing prams, girlfriends of the yobs in the pub. This whole picture sucks.

And that's OK. Alderney's a beautiful place, and the people - by and large - are lovely. It's the enchanted isle and where I choose to live. It only sucks today because I'm looking at it through shit colored galsses. And that's OK too. I almost never feel alone, even more seldom does it bother me. It'll soon pass. Still, emotions are important, they let you know when you're out of balance. And today they're telling me I should be investing more of my time, money and effort into personal relationships and to developing interpersonal skills.

I think enthusiasm and success have a lot to do with one another. The island's been a perfect place to get on with persuing my goals for the past six months or so, and I'm happy with my progress in most areas. The goal I need to focus more on as spring comes in is 'Have a varied and satisfying sex life.' Number three on my list for this year :-) So I need to fill the role of 'Princess' in the great romantic comedy that is my life. And, come to think of it, my life could use a little more romance, and comedy.

TODO: Work on my stand-up act.

Alderney does have some hot sexy young women. But... they both work at the Moorings, and I don't think either likes me much. That said, it's easy to see a lack of options in such a small community, there's certainly not enough girls to play any kind of numbers game. Like in London you might be able to go up to 30 girls and ask if they want a quickie and eventually one will say yes. Can't do that here, you ask all three single girls, and then you're out of options. Also, there'll be the same three single girls tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.

Like Groundhog Day. But to think of that as a shortage is to forget that three single girls is more than anyone needs. One is the exact, perefect number of girls to have a relationship with, and two is the exact, perfect number for sex, so three is a surplus. And they're all dying with eager anticipation for a chance to go out with me. They just don't know it yet. Man, there are some sloooooow-ass learners here.

I'm not planning to land a local girl. I may bring one person into my life, I probably don't want a feudal clan of the island's old families. Shakespeare wrote an excellent cautionary tale about the hassle a girls parents can be, hang me for Romeo. Besides which, local girls come with baggage, every coarse violent loser she's ever dated, all her extended family, everyone she's known her whole life, will be everywhere I go. And endless poo with people's grapevine based opinions. Way too complicated.

Fortunately, only abut half the population are locals, and spring'll bring a fresh herd of waitresses and bar staff to the island for the tourist season, and probably some foreign party girls now and then :-) So I should be preparing, not complaining. I've got into Skype recently (voice chat for you technophobes). Occurs to me this is the perfect tool for practicing girl skills, can call some lonely person up, try different tacks for making first impression, then see how fast and hard I an get her laughing.

Should also read more Kenrick Cleveland, he writes books on sales and persuasion and stuff like that using his own approach to NLP. Be hella useful if this stuff can be made to work, and if I'm skyping there's no risk of wierding any locals out. I must finish reading 'Influence Spinning', it's a pretty mind bending book, with some answers to a very interesting question: How does one go about being an influential person? Awesome.

So... Kenrick. Or I could go watch the crisp eating competition at the pub up the road. To complete it someone has to eat 30 bags of Walkers crisps in one hour. Yeah, that sounds like fun...