lovehatethings

I also always think of Marillion's "Hotel Hobbies", even though the lyrics paint a far seedier experience than I usually have. I imagine that, for someone whose job had them living in hotels on a weekly basis, they may able to identify with some of the experiences in the lyrics more readily. I just dig any lyrics that Derek Dick writes.

The tell tale tocking of the last cigarette
marking time in the packet as the whisky sweat
lies like discarded armour on an unmade bed.
A familiar craving is crawling in his head.

And the only sign of life is the ticking of the pen
Introducing characters to memories like old friends.
Frantic as a cardiograph scratching out the lines,
A fever of confession a catalogue of crime in happy hour.

Do you cry in happy hour? Do you hide in happy hour?
The pilgrimage to happy hour.

New shadows tugging at the corner of his eye,
jostling for attention, as the sunlight flares
through a curtains tear, shuffling its beams
as if in nervous anticipation of another day.

Now I know that with a lovehate topic like web advertising someone is going to expect paragraphs about pop-ups, but really, with the browser technology available today does every really need to see a pop up again? I don't remember the last time I saw a pop up for a poker site or porn but it wasn't too long ago that my desktop would be beseiged by them. I will say that almost as annoying as pop-up ads are the banner or sidebar ads that make noise. Try scrolling through the torrent compiler mininova.org with a smiley banner droning out a constant "Hello?" or a sidebar ad that crackles with a plasma energy burst that sounds like the electric pulses from the Commodore 64's Impossible Mission.

Now that Google is perfecting its "Blog Search" technology, the site can, on a week by week basis, navigate the meme streets and provide the Adsense matrix engine fodder to figure out which ads to show me and when, privacy advocates will start to squirm, and surfers will seek out proxy servers, and the truly paranoid will shut off every cookie and manually fill out form fields every visit back to a site. But what's the real problem here? I've consigned myself to the fact that I'm not going to be able to exist on the web without advertising of some sort. That said, 99% of ads have become wallpaper to me.

So I ask myself, do I really care that Google or any other company is compiling data about me to better target advertising to my browser? And the answer is yes, I do care, but not for the reasons you might think.

I care because I remember the layers of porn popups upon visiting warez sites and ads that were simply reaching for a clickthrough by sheer numbers. I care because I once had to sacrificially frag a Bonzi Buddy in effigy to keep myself sane. I care because I would rather see an unobtrusive column of a few links and text that maybe, once out ten thousand times, should I choose to click it, will actually be about something that I may have a fleeting interest in instead of some peripheral perception of static cunieform.

Let ads line me up in crosshairs. Show me something from a tech store or a blogging service or a social networking site instead of some banal cartoonish test of skill that I'm supposed to strive for in a sidebar. Show me something about Guinness or Jack Daniels instead of St. Pauli's and Bacardi. Pitch me an HDTV or a torrent app instead of an instant messenger add-on that will allow me to send sparkly smileys. Try to tempt me with a some consumer electronics or gadgets instead of mutual funds or insurance. I'd rather at least hold up the facade that at least somewhere in a server wearhouse The Gibson is parsing an algorithm to learn something about me instead of just sitting there cranking out spam into a billion killfiles.

Make no mistake, if I could choose between surfing the web with or without ads, I'd definitely forgo banners and pop-ups and sidebars - oh my! But if I have to live with web ads, I'll take the enemy I know over the enemy I don't.

I know that most people usually spend at least some time in gas stations these days thinking about how many oil company execs they can drown in the still oil-laden waters of Alaska, but after you faint and awake, looking up, you may find that design did not leave the petrol pumps behind.

I'm shocked how many people don't know Victor Wooten through his work with Bela Fleck or his solo stuff. If you love the funk and the bottom end, take a few minutes to groove in your chair to Victa.

Please check out my latest blog/podcasting escapades with my good friend Mike Vardy from www.effingthedog.com.

At DyscultureD we skewer the latest pop culture happenings north and south of “The 49th Parallel” - including movies, television, music, the internet, gadgets and much more. Feel free to explore the site and the podcast as we turn pop culture upside down to a state we like to call…DyscultureD.

I don't care what anyone says, I need Xzibit to pimp my ride out to look like this... okay... if he wants to add a few plasma screens, spinners, and turntables that's cool too.

The Ty Warner Penthouse Suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in NYC costs a mere $30,000/night. Who stays in their room while in NYC? I think I'd rather get 30 $1000 rooms and have a party on an entire floor.

In the past I have been anything but an apoligist for the tech world's advancements. I crave some of the visions of the future that I grew up with in sci-fi films and televisions. From a teleporter to a self-drive aircar. From a replicator or holodeck to an omnipresent mainframe that serves the needs of humanity... of course somehow these scenarios inevitably turn out bad.

The backbone for all such technology demands an immense mainframe that contains, if not the total, at least a large chunk of academic, social and personal information to dole out upon request. And while I know that, in most dystopian film plots, the archetypal consequence for individuals giving up their knowledge often ends badly, there is a lingering attraction to a tool that at command, whim and request can produce information and content that is uniquely customized to a user within a specific environment.

The first step to such a system has its nascent development in cloud computing, and while part of me is ready to release my kite into the cummulus, another part of me is remembering Twitter's Fail Whale and 404 errors of days gone by.

There is inherent risk that's greater than someone hacking Amazon to steal credit card information or a government website to lift social security numbers. Cloud computing demands that beyond the day to day information necessary to run our lives, we also commit our memory - i.e. writing, pictures, music and emails. And while many of us have copies of pictures in Flickr and stream music from last.fm, are we ready to commit the sole copies of such things to the cloud?

Being a victim of credit card fraud can range from annoying to devastating, but imagine a future where a system crash wipes out the only existing images of deceased loved ones or a child's first birthday. When do we reach that level of trust, not with certain things, but with EVERYTHING? For the skynet to work its magic, and be all it can be, it needs such information. Google, and other Web 2.0 in-browser software, would have us move all of our documents and spreadsheets into the cloud. Through blogs, many people have given up their creativity to the cloud... after all, how many of us keep backups of everything we post? Flickr has, what I'm sure, are the sole copies of at least some visual records of people and places and events. The news is moving from paper to html to rss to xml and soon hard copies will be a thing of the past.

Make no mistake. The sky is getting bigger. The clouds are growing in size and getting more numerous. The sun, however, is becoming infrequent and I can feel a storm coming on. I don't know when the first PCs and Macs will ship without hard drives, but I think we're within ten years. I don't know how soon after that a lightning strike will erase all visual records of someone's Uncle Owen or Aunt Beru, but I'm thinking we're within eleven years. I don't know when all high speed networking will be wireless and paid for through taxes, but I can see it through the rain.

I do know this. When I have to suffer a blackout, I feel, sadly, lost without a TV or my computer. My content has disappeared and now I have to spend time reading books, which, in a cloud world, will soon not exist off of my computer... well, at least I'll be okay until the batteries on my Kindle 2010 run out and my iPod nano version 10 (which has been broken to countersink into my forearm and run off of bio-electical energy) shorts out my nervous system. I suppose I can pick up a piece of charcoal from the barbeque and scratch some renderings of the circling wildlife that's coming back to claim a world where all knowledge has been shorted out by a failed surge protector.

While I love the concept of cloud computing, it's going to take a lot of convincing to get me to let go of the kite string that keeps my information grounded.