Way back to 2004 in more ways than one.

I'm finding new and creative ways to not pour through every piece of paper that I've touched in the last five years.

Listening to some old tunes. Eminem's track "Mosh" once again doesn't disappoint. He's not really my favorite artist, but he is brilliant and this song strikes an important chord with me. Free speech is ill, but not dead.

"Back To Reality, Oops There Goes Gravity"

So I missed my daily post ideal by a _long_ shot. I tripped on my way to a beach in southern Cambodia and woke up on Garth's couch. Some things in my life were causing me grief and not everything can be taken care of from 12 time zones away.. as much as I will it to be different.

So I'm back, reality is taking a bit (a lot) of getting used to. The blog lives on, just need a couple more days to deal with a nagging feeling in my head that I am in hell.

One good reason to not live in Cambodia

You will have to look at these two pictures in tandem unfortunately. They are out of focus and poorly lit. So was I obviosly. WiMax is surprising, but Cambodia also had one of the fastest and highest cell phone adoption around in the early days. I guess when you have no existing sunk cost of infrastructure, you are free to adopt newer technologies as a cost savings (ones that don't involve burrying billions of dollars of medium).

Lame post in my quest for daily thoughts.

I've been a busy boy; leaving scant moments to think about blogging. I am also cheating a bit with my daily posts, me being 11 hours ahead of the blogger clock and all. Its actually the 4th where this comes from.

I'm about to hop into a boat for the day to go fishing with my new best "friend" before slipping back into Thailand for the 50th time.

The Time Traveler's Wife (Yet another book report)

I lost my copy of The Trial. I got rudely awoken from a coma on a long bus trip in Thailand. It was 4am and time to switch buses. How rude. I left; witless and bookless. I guess it could have been worse. It was a great story, or at least the first half. In perhaps the biggest swing in reading history, I picked up a love story called “The Time Traveler's Wife” at a used bookstore. Selection is generally limited in such places and I tend to find myself picking up anything that I’ve heard of and this title had recently received a glowing recommendation from a friend. I always try to read books that people recommend to me, so it was a better situation than I would normally find myself in.

Book’d but still witless, I powered through this delightful tomb in short order. I found myself hopelessly in love with Claire (the female main of the book - someone or other’s wife) and sympathetic for the time traveler and all of the issues that his affliction causes. The author nicely side stepped the whole time line pollution / what comes before what / space time continuum / collision / infinite number of timelines or 5 timelines… or whatever… that usually dogs time travel stories. She just didn’t talk about it which was actually refreshing. As soon as a story tries to address the proposed “science” or philosophical implications of time travel it either becomes impenetrable or so full of holes that you spend too much time trying to fill them. Anyone recently watched “Back to the Future”? They kind of explain part of the problems of time travel (Marty McFly meeting his mother etc.) which makes you start to be worried about polluting / changing events in the future, but then they do things like Marty (from the future who doesn’t even exist yet) being the impetus for the guitar sound of Chuck Berry. How did Marty know how to play Johnny B Good if Berry never found his “sound” without the help of Marty? There are a bunch of points that regress infinitely or circle back on each in these types of stories. In any event, Back to the Future isn’t a stunning example of theoretical time traveling wisdom. Neither is “The Time Traveler's Wife” I guess, but I didn’t even think about the chronicle ins and outs. I was more than happy to just agree that this was how it was and to wonder along with the characters about what was going on.

Not quite like Stienbeck’s uncanny ability to devote 3 pages to the colour of dirt, but the writing style of Audrey Niffenegger definitely indicates that her topics are very well researched (or well experienced). I didn’t know anything about making paper but there were quite detailed and enjoyable descriptions of the process. She didn’t say “they played a game of pool and a ball was sunk”; she described the play by play in detail. I’ll call it a pleasing compromise between sparse and ad nauseum.

I’ve rewritten the following 10 times. I didn’t know the name of the author until I was done the book, didn’t even look. By the end of it though, I was convinced that the author was a dude. I really don’t think that I am predisposed to assume that about something that I am reading, but maybe I am? I’ve never really thought about it. I hope that there is something in the style and content that made me start to feel that way and that I began this book with a completely neutral opinion about it. I have never read 500 pages without knowing the author, so I don’t have a lot of data on how my brain works. How do I identify with the author of fiction that I read (and what role does their gender play in this?)

Does it matter?

Looks like it is going to be a film. I look forward to it.

Off the rails in Phnom Penh

Hmmm it has been a while. Updating ye old blog hasn’t been top on the list. I’m trying to write more, but haven’t been successful. I’m going to update something here every day of November to try and keep me a bit more regimented. Only time will tell whether the following tidbit of info is fortunate or not, but this month will also see me updating from my old stomping grounds of Canada. Yikes.

D and I headed up to Bangkok and on to Cambodia. It came down to a choice of staying a week in Thailand waiting for the full moon or moving on to something a little bit more “active”. I was hesitant to come back here. It had been almost 10 years since my last visit and it is abundantly clear to me of late that you can never go back. I had also heard some distressing things. A friend who I have a strong attachment with (and also just happened to bear witness to my less than stellar start to traveling) had recently been to Cambodia, knew how I felt about my time there and told me in no uncertain terms that I should never return. That the place had turned into Disneyland and that whatever it was that I had found back in the day, it was not to be found here today. Five starred, air-conditioned bus ferried, sweaty, conical hat sporting tourists running amok in the most intense and favourite of the countries I had visited. This is the stuff that nightmares are made of. So I had to steel myself against coming back. In reality it was more an exercise in dissociation, around which I was mostly successful. So now I have two different visits to two radically different countries that just so happen to occupy the same geographical borders. There will inevitably be some posts around this, but my thoughts are still somewhat immature.

My self honouring kick took a little bit of a kicking. We somehow found a way to drink ourselves heavily across Cambodia. Hank became the villainous mastermind for everything from our debauchery to making a chair particularly uncomfortable. He did introduce us, and if that hadn’t of happened then we wouldn’t be nursing such ravenous hangovers. Simple logic really. Damn you Henry.

It was fun to travel with someone for a bit. Shared experience isn’t something that I have been having a lot of and we saw some strange shit together. When you assess the wreckage of countless beers, snakes on sticks, beef/goose/liver/??? lok lak (basically plates of quick, stir fried meat) and 5 drunk Khmers its nice to have someone sitting beside you who at least knows how to pronounce your name. Well, for most of the night anyways (sorry highschool). If I was out by myself that night then I would have brought my camera instead of relying on someone else. Henry – thanks for nothing. Why do you hate me so much? See? Its kind of fun :)

The caveat to having someone to talk to and share perspective is that some of my weaker moments were also born witness to. Like my lack of any sense of direction and poor haggling skills. Like leaving the door ajar to the room in our guest house one night and my resembling anything but a 'guide'. Or this fun late night diversion - hunkering down with some street side locals for a round of gambling in a card game that I didn't know the rules of. I always feel like there is a material cost for learning new games. It just so happened that there was so little English available to me that I spent $3 on learning almost nothing. Paying out mysterious odds and needing help to organize my hand against the house does not bode well for raking in mass amounts of cash. Derek says that I got robbed. I say that I was just the most unlucky tourist in the country. The truth is probably in between those two extremes, likely closer to Derek's estimate than I would like to admit. We ended up gambling more than I would have thought. Betting on baccarat, drinking bathtub gin at a casino in Cambodia is not something that you get to do with just any old friend. Do you know how to play baccarat? Neither do we. All said, I was able to keep my very surprising and perfect, 20 year in the running, every country I have ever been in, record of breaking even while gambling. Phew!

D doesn’t pull punches, shares the same humour as me and is one smart dude. I guess what I am saying here is that I didn’t really know him at all :) Good times, but remarkably unsustainable.

My name is Michael and I have an addiction to Google. I hope. I fear. I rant on a Wednesday afternoon in Bangkok (Book report)

[EDITOR'S NOTE: I wrote this awhile ago. I was trying to write something that I could send outside of this blog. I realize that I have a bit of a ways to go, that this really is more linearly derivative of the book than I thought and that nobody officially cares about a two year old book. It was a good exercise for me though. Sorry for the length - its long.]

I've finished the Google Story. Although not "sanctioned" by Google, the authors gave the company a last read of the manuscript in order to ensure "fairness and accuracy" in the project. This sounds a little bit too much like "Authorized" to me. For the time, and by whatever understanding, it allowed the authors unprecedented access to people and information and I am glad. I found it to be very readable and interesting; it is just best enjoyed through gray, salt grained glasses. It left me with healthy beliefs that there were turmoils, tribulations and ruthlessnesses that were only glossed over in the book while describing the company's meteoric rise. At two years old, the account is also somewhat dated. All said however, it is a great success story and it makes me happy. I like to think that a company went from the garage to $200B with nothing but a good idea and some integrity.

I would subtly shift the praise of the Google Guys away from their dedication to "anything is possible". They excelled in one trait to set them apart: their ability to think big. Crystal ball, divining rod in their hands, Shiva gearing up for some ass kicking big. It is the ability to anticipate growth and usage patterns - to define the future, to solve a problem on a scale that doesn't exist today (but will tomorrow) that led to their greatness.

The ideation for traditional search engines came out of a time when there were a manageable number of websites. If there were only 30 websites on a topic that I took seriously, then I wanted to look at them all and be grateful that they all appeared in a single list. Yes, it became unmanageable and websites began to game the system. I remember a lot of crap results on searches in AltaVista. I remember being shown the World Wide Web for the first time when there were no search engines, or none that I knew of. I also remember abysmal "Wheat to Chafe" ratios while using Usenet and in Google itself when sites temporarily found a way to manipulate it. (I also remember gopher. I am old). I am sure that there were ways that would have come out of the woodwork to rank pages on metrics other than their content; ideas that would have resulted in acceptable results in the short term. "Search" is an automation problem begging for some smart, ivory tower champions, but if Sergey and Larry didn't divine that search was THE problem leading to subsequent monetization of the Internet then it would have died on the lab floor like it did at *insert player at the time here*. For the masses, tight and efficient information gathering begets usefulness and lack of frustration. Happy web users beget paying customers. Yahoo had their own take on the problem of a low W:C ratio. It was a highly effective (for the user), personally touched, not comprehensive and expensive way to approach it. This was fine for the time, but faltered in the face of the mind bending growth of the World Wide Weeb. Google solved the problem for the then, but also solved it for the foreseeable future. I don't think it is accidental that they approached this problem in the "n state" which is a strong indication of their mathematical roots. Their "special sauce" was scalable in a time when scalability wasn't as crucial as it is today; a situation requiring minimal incremental cost with no degradation in, and vast improvement to, the user experience against a logarithmic growth of a subject. They were the first to strive for and apply this seemingly impossible set of criteria to the web experience. Everyone else said it wasn't worth it or couldn't be done.

So they were smart. They solved an increasingly annoying problem through automation. BUT they were successful because they suspected both the magnitude of the future problem and its subsequent, inherent, dampening effect on a random user's exuberance with a new medium. They improved and continue to deliver a high level of user experience. Although this appears to have been done in a purely "for the good of the world" manner, I don't think that they were blind to the money making potential of the Web that their work paved the way for. Simply put, Google enabled average users to access goods and services on the Internet in a time frame that their patience could endure. It just so happened that Google was also there to monetize on this trend on a scale that is unprecedented to date. Maybe this is accidental. Maybe I give them more praise then they deserve. It just seems so perfect to me.

One of the main hurdles of the day was user retention. If you didn't lock a user in then what was stopping them from flocking en mass to the next "ivory basement" incubator that came up with a better way to search? Google is free. You can go into any crap ass Internet cafe in the world and it will be set as the homepage (if your luck is like mine, then it will be in one of the least comprehensible languages of the 100+ Google has on offer). In any event, I think this discussion is one area that shows the age of the book. Today - Google, through its superior product offering, is solving its onetime angst over the issue with an increasing number of people who are hopelessly "locked" in. They keep building it, and people keep coming. No longer will someone merely need to be a better search portal to win the right to quarterback my Internet experience. They will need to provide me with a high quality web mail service, blogging, financial reporting and tracking, customized news feeds, website tracking tied into advertising campaigns, tell me where to go because I get lost a lot, entertain me through sites like Youtube, telephony and instant messaging, fast and efficient desktop searching, image searching and a decent personal photographic repository, website hosting, free Microsoft Office-like tools, social conscience and innovation, millions of searchable books and on and on.... One stop shopping never looked better. If Google buys Facebook, they will own everything that I do with my computer these days, except surfing (which they already own the start of).

[EDITOR'S NOTE: M$ just threw $260 mil to buy 1.6% in facebook. Thats a $15 BILLION valuation. It doesn't make sense. They must simply be trying to keep it out of the hands of Google which doesn't bode well for the state of desperation in Redmond.]

I've had privacy concerns about Google in the back of my head for some time. My main criticism of this book is that it didn't go deeply enough into this topic which I believe will become an ever alarming one as Google continues to deepen their online dominance. To be fair, I need to divulge that I sometimes have a paranoia bent. I also need to say that I am predisposed to like Google and I continue to be a huge supporter of their efforts. They have greatly improved and accelerated my Internet experience for years. I'm conflicted.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: I want to work at Google. Their approach to innovation and employee retention is the best that I have ever heard.]

Google keeps EVERYTHING. Every piece of data it can. It's smart. Who knows what artificial intelligence efforts are going on in the bowels of the Googleplex to create the next best engine? Stuff like that needs data. Patterns existed since the beginning of time, long before the science of pattern recognition's ability to mathematically "find" them. History and behavior is important for future innovation. The more comprehensive the data, the better. Even if you don't know what to do with it now, it better be collected because you can't go back in time (I'd love to see an estimate of the value of the Google historical database - $Billions I would think). Assuming the Internet and its contents cannot be destroyed on a grand scale, we finally have in place a method to maintain the summation of human knowledge and keep it cataloged to boot. There will be no dark ages of 2100-2400. It comes with a price though, don't mistake this point. Google as a service has always come at the cost of handing over an increasing amount of personal data about thoughts and behaviors. It started with mostly anonymous search patterns and is bound only by what information the masses are willing to concede (or know that they are handing over). New and exotic products will entice me to give them even more personal data. Would I take an intensive personality test to better understand why it is that I do the things I do? Would I like Google to find my perfect mate out of 100 million possible candidates? Probably. All I would have to do is tell them more about myself. It would be free; the only noticeable affect would be that I would find the ads beside my email or during my searches that are strangely more compelling. Wow, today's the day that I need to shave and I'm out of condoms. Isn't it amazing that someone is willing to FedEx me a combo pack overnight for the low, low price of $5.99? How fortuitous. [Suckers. I haven't had sex in forever and I use an electric razor. But Google reads my blog... the gig is up. Probably a more likely marketing prize pack would be a "How to Pickup Women by Liking Yourself" book and 25% off coupon from a local makeover hut. You get the point I am making though.]

In the beginning, to tie a user to their searches, you would have had to merge two databases (I use this term loosely). An ISP would need to divulge to Google that I was at a specific IP for a timeframe, and Google would have to correlate that to a search record. When I signed up for Gmail, all of this changed for me. I tied a more traceable identity to substantially everything I do on the Internet. I no longer sit down to anonymously search. Before I do anything, I put my hand up to Google and tell them where I am through checking my mail and then spend the rest of the time doing whatever it is that I do. Google has access to every single communication that I have had for the last 16 months. It knows how much money I have in the stock market. They know what I did in Toronto on a given night in 2006 and what I did in Jakarta last Friday night. It knows every symptom of my health (good and bad) that I have ever had (imaginary or not). Google knows every prescription drug that I have ever put, or thought of putting, into my body. They know what I search for late at night...

Not some random collection of octets... ME. This isn't the science fiction work of an author with a premonition for us to look at 30 years later and muse "how did she know?" This is today and it is real. Maybe the idea that someone will mine through this data about me is far fetched, but the data is there for the taking. At the time of writing of the book, Google was anonymizing everything that is 18 months and older. I'm not sure where they are at right now. But this is a PR move. 18 becomes 24, 24 months becomes 24 years. It is whatever the populace will stand for at the time.

I have strong opinions and an inquisitive mind. I am also going grey. Maybe one day I decide I should bleach my hair to pretend I was still virile. In searching for peroxide, I remember that it was the main ingredient in the failed London subway bombings. I get side tracked. I start trying to figure out how they actually tried to do that. I'm searching from Bali, I'm going to Medan. I search on the Sari club (what type of bomb did they use there I wonder?). What other clubs are there in Bali? An hour later I am searching God knows what. Under the umbrella of "war on terror" the States subpoenas Google for all users who have done searches for these X words / ideas, who has demonstrated disapproval of the president, who has traveled through X countries, who has searched for X music and these eBooks, who signed an email petition against the prisoners in Guantanamo bay, who is disenfranchised and jobless. I'm taking it pretty far here and I don't believe that the jackboots are about to kick down the door, but it is a very accessible slippery slope. I don't think it would be too hard to raise "flags" if all of my historical web data was laid out for all to see. I actually don't know under what circumstances Google would have to divulge this information to a third party. Google is just a company though, so in the end they might fight the good fight but they will lose if someone cared enough.

Google is heavily involved in science and is blazing forward into understanding DNA and low level genetic makeup. This will revolutionize medicine and understanding on what makes us tick on a biological level. It isn't a stretch that my computer will know everything that there is to know about my DNA (if I really wanted it to, I could probably make that possible right now). I will search Google with my DNA as a search term. Personalized medicine is a result (shipped to me directly overnight) and alarm bells will ring if there are risks that I need to be made aware of.

Once the information on Facebook (or subsequent "social utility") is integrated, they will know that my wife and I will have a child with blue eyes and that my grandson will be bald. That we should have aborted 1 in 5.6 pregnancies due to a risk of Downs Syndrome. That I like the smell of gasoline and I lived in a time of lead additives. That I love sushi and that I have spent a lot of time in the sun. That my friends from Caledonia are 7.3% less likely to develop breast cancer than the national average and that I need 5% more iron in my diet. This isn't THAT far fetched.

I currently trust Google with my data, although I wish it didn't exist. I don't want to be accused of being overly Orwellian here, BUT this is the first time in history that thought policing is starting to become possible. Most of my thoughts exist in a single, distributed database which I have no control over. I no longer own my contributions to it, nor can I query its contents. A "Patriot Act" on steroids, a shift in company philosophy of one of the largest corporate entities in history and a shift in the legal definition of "premeditated" and I am in jail for the rest of my natural life. If someone said to you 10 years ago that the US was going to pull your library card, tap your phone without a warrant and hold hundreds of people in jail without charge for 6 years, wouldn't you have called them insane? "Oceania" I say in a masking cough. Hardy har har ... no, not really.

Google.. You have a MASSIVE responsibility to the world right now. Take it seriously from today until the day I die. Then you can let everyone know about my sexual proclivities, my penchant for bacon and the fact that I sometimes like to investigate the unsavory.

It was a good book.

Interesting breakdown on the thumbupyourassitis of partisan politcs

Bit too much formage, but that is not the point.



Thanks Michelle. See? I do love you :)

BANG (Veg Festival - Day 2, Phuket Thailand)

Just so you know that I'm not exagerating about the firecracker safety part, I posted a video. I was covered with shrapnel today.

Derek and Jim came down after their case of the climbing Krabis. Good to see a friend from home. More craziness at the festival, I'm glad it didn't disappoint cuz then I would have looked like a big fat liar :)

Currency redux. Or is this just a bunch of lunatics? (Vegetarian Festival, Phuket, Thailand)

I believe this to be the best photo that has ever been taken, although tough to call. It left a very deep impact on me from the moment I saw it and continues to affect me in a profound way to this day. I even remember busting out the dictionary to look up the word "immolation" (oh dictionaries.. those where the days). The strength of conviction, the commitment to a greater cause, the passion, the command over ones body and the power of self during what was a terrible time in a history of another part of the world. This frame captured all of it and is the distillate of complex emotions during a very complex circumstance (and the cover of the first Rage Against the Machine album - whats not to be moved by here?)

[Read the story of Thich Quang Duc, or Malcolm Browne (photographer, not a lot of info on this link), or David Halberstam (writer) if you are interested.]

My entire life I have wanted to believe in something this strongly. The fact that I am striving to temper this and its derivative thoughts fills me with great angst and regret. I am sure to spend multiple sessions on a couch one day over this photo and what it represents to me.

Today:
I wish that I knew more about the meaning of today. Some of the below may be naive and incomplete. I'm going to do some research and talk to more folks so that I can hopefully shed some light on it i.e. this is what I saw and I will back fill with some info soon.

A group of us went down to a temple for the Vegetarian Festival. It is a turning over of sorts, where you "creatively" atone for your sins of last year and bank some luck for the one coming. Like me, you may think that a morning hanging out with a bunch of vegetarians would leave you wanting some excitement. I mean, how odd can things get? They don't even eat the pig! Snore fest here we come.

I milled around waiting for something to happen from about 4:30 to 5:30 and then things started to get pretty strange. Really strange. Loony Tunes having a bastard child with Lewis Carrol strange. Dudes where coming out of the temple shaking like a leaf. They would present themselves to an altar and snap a whip that was wrapped around their neck with 30 or 40 incense sticks in their hands. I'm guessing they were possessed, which you would have to be to subject yourself to what comes next: piercings. Extreme facial piercings. You could drive a Mac truck through some of the holes that got cut in these cheeks. A big conical spike of stainless steel is used to make a hole which is sufficiently large for the individuals preferred adornment. Normal stuff mind you, like metal rods, glass rods with cute little figurines on the ends, radio antennas still attached to alarm clocks, swords, axes, guns, chrome bicycle chains, parasols, tree branches.... Like I said: Boooring. They do all the piercings in front of the crowd and pictures are not only tolerated but seem encouraged. Less blood than you might think, but I somehow felt like I could taste iron all day long.

I went inside the temple (the smokiest place on earth) to see what was going on. People sitting around amicably with lots of music. Boring. Then the great Croupier of Nothingness calls out someones number and they are off like a shot. They dance and twitch and talk like a bird or moan or scream. They get fit with some ceremonial garb and get led out to mutilate for the masses.

Once everyone was sorted there was an exodus into the streets. It was a 5+ mile walk to the end of the parade route. There were porters who carried mini alters to I am not sure what (one of the things I need to figure out) and everyone on the streets threw firecrackers at them (and me). Startling lack of firecracker safety going on during this thing and some of the blasts were large and in charge. After all was said and done and we were waiting for a ride back, we actually got in a firecracker fight with four 10 year olds from across the street. Everyone throws firecrackers AT you and they rain down from long poles overhanging the street.

We were here to support this fine young man, sporting an axe and knife / gun combo. All the rage for spring. I am embarrassed to say that I don't even know his name. By the time I caught up with the group after the initial mayhem, introductions were impossible for obvious reasons. The participants were often stopped for photos by Thai and foreigners alike. He needed handlers to keep the crowd from nudging something painfully and to apply antiseptic and what appeared to be an oil to keep the cuts clean and moist in the burning sun. It was HOT, I had trouble walking the length. I can't imagine doing it with 15lbs of steel through my cheeks. He wasn't even spared the firecracker rain. It was exciting and perplexing. D-rock is coming in tonight and we are going to go again tomorrow. Frankly, it will be tough to stomach a second time.

While the sun rose, I found myself locked in a stare with a guy for a second or two. This was before we got rudely interrupted by a spear going through his cheek and his eyes rolling back in their sockets. Fear - animalistic, raw terror is what I saw. I don't know how to process it. Fear is so imminently understandable given a circumstance such as this, but I was surprised to find it somehow. I wonder if a moment not unlike this one was shared in Vietnam circa 1963? Different stakes, odds and payoffs, but there has to be a moment when the brain is able to elucidate the worldly consequence of ones devotion to an ideal.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a currency that I am not equipped to trade. However, I am not ashamed to say that I admire those who are brave enough to save it up and spend it on something that is important to them.

I took a stupid number of pictures:

One of the porters. They blew him up reeeeeal good. Check out the firecracker remnants in his hair.

I was very disturbed by this guy. Yes, those are real guns.

This was the head dude. Notice the firecrackers going off around him.

Nothing like a little self hatcheting to start the day off right.