There’s so much to the creative process I don’t understand. Why two people’s art can look and sound so different, yet be distinctly theirs. Why when you seek to imitate it you feel like a forger and your art like a forgery, no matter how remarkable the result.

I can’t count the number of songs I’ve written and the number of poems I’ve pulled out of my head. I don’t think I’d want to. They come and go in phases and shifts. I could never count on a living as a musician: I simply can’t turn it on like a tap. I can sit at the piano and write fifty different phrases and attach fifty different lyrics to those phrase but they won’t satisfy me. Thirty minutes or two days later I sit down and the first thing I play is magic.

There are so few chords and combinations of notes, really. There are only so many ways to put them together before you run out and have to start recycling.

Sometimes you can want desperately to write about something but find yourself unable to write about it and instead spend a half hour writing about something else when you should be sleeping.

Playing old songs is a challenge. I can never remember exactly how they go. Maybe I’m making them up as I go, again, and I have no way of knowing. Only the few I record I know for certain. The rest are possibly recent.

Isn’t it strange how music can reach out and tweak something inside you that logic and facts and science can never explain, much less themselves touch? I played a song the other day that made me feel sad in a way I haven’t felt for a long time now. It made me feel something. This amazes me.

Thinking back, my former art was a shallow imitation of feeling, a tissue-thin façade less tangible than those things I professed to know and write about. If you had to hear them, I am sorry. If you felt a remarkable kinship for me then, even more so. I should be forgiven, I think, for those songs and the words to those songs. We all should, who wrote like that. We were children. If we had a grasp of irony far in excess of our years, we squandered it on songs we thought were about love. We were obsessed with love and being in love and writing about love and being in love. When you are in the desert you write songs about water. We are adults now and instead of obsessing some of us have moved on and are actually loving and being in love. That’s a much harder thing to write about. There’s almost no way to do it properly.

If I’m being too subtle in my lyrics, I don’t apologise. If you can mine seventeen different meanings or none at all, I couldn’t care less. These songs are for me, not for you. These things are the most intensely selfish things I will ever produce, the most tuned to myself. They can’t help but be. They’re my intellectual and emotional children. That you hear them, some of them, is a raw vulnerability I can’t help but shy away from. This is the singer/songwriter curse, of course. These are not songs written by a group of people in a room. They’re not statements about politics or revolution or technological disorientation. They’re songs that bubble to the surface in privacy, when alone.

I have become too verbose.

Now, I have to say the gym is nice. The equipment is new, there’s a nice variety of stuff, and you know, it’s a gym. We do our thing.

But my wife was just pressured for 15 minutes or so after the fitness test to buy a bunch of sessions with a personal trainer. Which is really neat: After a gruelling fitness test where you feel terrible about yourself because you’re basically made out of dough, they give you all the stats about exactly how much dough you’re made of, and then proceed to try to sell you an oven.

Guess what: I know how this works. I know how to up-sell. I know where your bread is buttered. It’s selling the extras. It’s like extended warranties at Future Shop. We can barely afford to go the gym as it is, but we’re doing it because we want to feel better about ourselves. We’re not trying to run a triathlon.

We may be out of shape, but we’re not idiots.

Wind power isn’t a viable always-on solution because wind isn’t always on. Step outside your house right now: It might be windy, or it might not be windy. Even places like parts of Texas which have almost constant prevailing winds, the wind sometimes dies down. When it does, we burn coal to keep the lights on.

So in order to use wind power as an always-on power generation system, we’d need a remarkably large array of batteries to store power for when the wind dies down.

Of course, batteries are expensive. No-one wants to buy as many batteries as it would take to store the amount of power needed for, say, an entire day without wind.

What if there were an existing infrastructure solution to this problem, though? What if there were literally millions of batteries out there just waiting to get plugged into the grid?

Maybe there will be someday soon: Electric cars. They’re basically filled with batteries. Think about it: You drive your car for 15 minutes to and from work at times with low power usage (because people are driving to work instead of using power) and the rest of the time it sits in a parking lot or a driveway.

Instead of just sitting there, it could be plugged into the power grid all night powering up when demand is lowest. Then when demand is highest during daylight hours, it could feed back into the grid if the grid needed it.

We’d still need other generation facilities, yes, because wind might die down for two days and we’d be cursed with having no power and no cars to drive, but for most of the “wind is dying down for two hours”, the blips that are the real concern, electric cars would solve the problem admirably.

Watching the rapid decline of XKCD.

General, I will feed you to the dogs
if you dare come round here anymore.
Didn’t you see them straining at the leash?
Maybe you should have a second thought.

Before you’re just a ghost,
disjointed sack of bones,
another sad reminder
we’re still free.

Office, they will rip you limb from limb
if you dare come round here anymore.
Didn’t you see them circling the yard?
Maybe you should take a second look.

Before you’re just a ghone,
disjointed sack of bones,
another truncheon lost
another sad reminder
we’re still free.

President, they will trail you through the fog
until they finally find your foul trail.
And when you ask for the mercy you deserve
trust me, we will all give it to you.

Before you’re just a ghost,
poignant sack of bones,
another leader lost,
another sad reminder
we’re still free.

I break through the door like I have just attained the speed of sound like I am passing through a vapour barrier like I am a gleaming metal machine screaming through the thinnest air. When my feet hit the pavement I am no longer human I am instead something that cannot be stopped like a mess of chrome and wire and electronic impulses. I suck air into my lungs I flex I streak forward I scream I make the muscles stretch and creak until I am again human and burning and panting and sweating and I am finally at work.

He calls and we have a conversation full of action verbs and short nouns that pop when you say them that sound like firecrackers going off. When I hang up the phone my legs are itching again and I can barely contain myself as I launch myself into the fray into the mass of people all running all the time. I am the finest I am the best I am their finest and also their proudest child. I am everywhere at once making things happen never running out of energy taking short liquid bursts from a plastic bottle I will crumple into a sharp ball and toss perfectly into a trash can ten feet away to the applause of my coworkers my superiors my subordinates my admirers. A plastic bottle and then another and then another and then another and some sort of energy bar that looks and tastes like sugary cardboard.

Ten hours lapses into night and I am running back home again I am passing the same storefronts the same people nodding hello the same streets the opposite way. I break through the door as if it isn’t there and I am home. I call him and we say things that people say to each other we talk for a half hour and finally run out of things to say and hang up the phone abruptly as if we have both realized the words are superfluous anyhow and we will not see each other’s faces for another month and this fact depresses us both. When we finally meet for one of our brief dalliances rendezvous flings romances we will run out of things to talk about and chaste ways to touch each other and fill the rest of the time with what we won’t talk about later except at angles and in ways that neither of us will acknowledge.

I begin a whirlwind dinner marathon the calorie count once again going into the positives but just barely just enough to keep me alive and running. I feel my stomach where I keep feeling my stomach every day my stomach and it is the same size the same bit of baby fat and I hate it. I keep taking down the mirror and covering them with towels accidentally so I don’t have to see my naked ugliness the ugly nakedness I know is there anyways the naked ugliness I can see when I close my eyes when I am not running when that calorie count goes too far into the positive. Somewhere in the back of my mind I know I know I know this is not healthy that this is not right and that I am obsessing and that I will one day feel my kidneys heart marrow skin vision shot through with rot and falling and failing and that I will die. In the meantime all I can see is the road ahead the road that I am running down that is running me down that is gradually coming to an end. It is my private vice my hidden disease that I can look the picture of health yet barely eat anything yet keep running running running running.

He doesn’t know my parents don’t know my sister doesn’t know no-one knows except me and my mirror and my legs and my shoes and my scantily clad cupboards and fridge. Before bed I distract myself by running out in the cool night air beneath a sky strewn with stars pounding pavement until I can no longer remember why I hated myself despised something what was I was thinking it no longer matters.

I fall into bed like it is Easter Island and I am made of stone and in my dream I am running away from something and not sure what it is though I am successful I am perfect I am all the things I want to be it is something something past something I cannot remember something that is chasing me and running me down as I feel my skin marrow kidneys synapses heart liver muscles shot through with rigor mortis and I can no longer move and I am staring it in the face it knows me and I know it yet when I wake up I can no longer remember what it was.

I wake to the sound of waves on a beach or static or thunder or something and I slough off the dream like sheets.

Cuban cigars out on the roof.
American whisky, eighty proof.
But you’re in your own world running loose,
and you’re making it up as you go.

Everyone seem to know how it should all work out,
but it’s all lies. They’re making it up as they go.

Thirty-three hours on the road
with vehicles turning into ghosts
on missions that only you can know,
you are making them up as they go.

Everyone seems to know where it should all end up,
but it’s all lies. They’re making it up as they go.

Eyes inward you are unable to inspect
your irresistible fractal curls,
the mesmeric mercuric minutae that
draw me, eyes inward.

That you are that you are is
testimony and testament, the
unfurling world in jasper and gold:
the prologue and the plot running
through it.

My internal electronics sparking across the gap,
ephemeral imagined notes and the cascading
columns of maths conspiring to
havoc.

But it was just a dream, a time and half a time,
that original sin, that clumsy stumbling
away from it.

Air is life and your throat is a umbilical cord connecting you to it. But other things are life as well. They require you have such a percent of a harmful material.

Do you shudder at the thought of what you were? Of course, of course you do. Go back? Never. But why are you left bruised by the memory as if jealous of yourself being so… free, or complicated, or something. Why are you not happier to have pushed through your own skin to emerge something new?

I have done that. I am still shaking it off like a passing thunder shower. There is a place in my head that has clouded over and needs to clear.

And like that, it’s gone.

The first option is the best, of course, and the police force has gone to great pains to make sure we all know there isn’t a double standard here. But there is a double standard, of course. While the rest of us would rot in jail (or rot on bail) with no method of support, the cops are suspended with pay.

There’s your double standard.

No, these proposed changes won’t change a thing. They’ll merely make things that us ground-level Canadians do illegal.

The problem with the bill isn’t that it wants to combat piracy. That’s fine. Piracy is bad. If we want free stuff, we can create it ourselves and release it under a free license.

The problem is that it makes transferring my music (that I bought) or my movies (that I bought) to a device illegal if the content provider has placed any sort of digital restriction on it.

This gives corporations the power over my rights. They can grant me (if they wish) to power to copy, but of course they don’t because they want to sell me a copy for each device I own, not a copy I can copy myself. The legislation purportedly protects these rights, but in fact does an end-run around them.

Of course the law won’t stop copying files. This is what digital media is about: Cheap reproduction. And digital restrictions are fundamentally flawed and will always be circumvented. So Canadians will still be doing what they like with the media they paid for, but now it will become illegal to do so.

This legislation stinks of being written by American corporate and governmental interests. This isn’t the Canada I know, where we simply kowtow to our American cousins. It offends me (as a person who voted for the Conservatives), and if this law passes, I will find somewhere better to place my vote.

Amen.

Imagine a world where people stop demanding a faster, more awesome computer, simply because they don’t need one any more. Imagine a world where the pendulum swings back to where it came from and remote servers are the big deal and local terminals are essentially (but not totally) dumb.

This would be a surprising (and frightening) world to both the founders of IBM with their big iron and the founders of Microsoft with their big desktop iron. They would both be wrong at least a great deal of the time. Even in those places one might expect big iron there are simply commodity machines connected together. In those places where one might expect big desktop iron there are simply a bunch of web applications. This would be the miracle of the network. This would be the Cloud at work.

Maybe something will come along soon to make this possible future extremely unlikely. I have no doubt that is possible. The web, the big network connecting the small networks, is that sort of disruptive technology. Note though that the web first developed over existing infrastructure: Telephone lines were the first transport technology to support the internet. Now the internet is drawing that infrastructure into itself. It’s not that strange to imagine that the internet will be the infrastructure that draws all the separate infrastructures we know and dislike (telephone, cable television, etc) and unites them. This is happening right now. The internet is the One Ring, if you will.

But my point is not to state the obvious, but to point out that the infrastructure that replaces the internet as we know it will probably (barring any truly disruptive technologies; keep in mind that I don’t claim this is a necessary development but merely a likely one) use the internet as its infrastructure and gradually subsume it. Anyone who has coded a AJAX application is praying desperately for that day to come, and soon.

I can imagine a world where Netbooks (or whatever you like to call them: I choose Mark Shuttleworth’s term because I happen to admire him) are essentially access points to the Cloud. Certainly specialised hardware exists: No one wants to edit video on something just larger than their palm. But small laptop like devices become at least one of the dumb(ish) access points to the internet at large. This, also, is already happening.

It’s entirely possible that Moore’s Law will stop functioning. It’s not a physical law, after all, and it is a meme entirely subject to physical impossibilities that require a great deal of ingenuity and expense to circumvent. It’s also entirely possible that Moore’s Law will become irrelevant as computers become smaller, more ubiquitous, and less visible. It’s hard, for instance, to fit a heat sink in your shoe; it’s easier to simply make a smaller program and use a processor with less processing power.

Perhaps soon processors themselves will become obsolete. Who knows.

I know this post has been long and taken many un-needed detours but let me interject some personal thoughts on personal computers: Good riddance and could you please give me my fish back. I am so sick to death of overpowered computers that need to be constantly upgraded to do (essentially) the same thing. I could run a word processor on my 486 that did almost everything that the word processor on my P4 does (namely, process words). There are really very few applications that deserve the sort of processing power we’ve got idling in our living rooms. Video editing, sure. Audio processing, sure. Graphic-intensive games? Absolutely.

Instant messaging? Web browsing? VoIP? Creating text documents? No way.

I’d rather like a future where I could buy a box as I needed it. Not tailored to a one size fits all Swiss Army Knife approach (I’m looking at you, Windows) where every five years brings a new chance to upgrade to a shiny new (and despicably slow) operating system with shine new (and despicably slow) hardware. I want something I can purchase and use and throw away when I’m done. I want something disposable.

Imagine if the only options you had when buying a car were Porches, MacLaren F-1s, and Jaguars. Would that make sense?

So my challenge (ringing loud and clear to about five people) is this: Make my future fast, inexpensive, and disposable. Make my data live out in the Cloud so I don’t have to tie it to a piece of physical hardware. Please. For the children.

Ubuntu is our Free Software black swan. How do we explain its sudden, rapid rise to international Linux stardom? How do we explain its overwhelming success in that domain?

Well, we don’t. You can attempt to apply narrative to Ubuntu’s sudden critical mass, but it doesn’t work. Ubuntu was there at the right time (whatever that means) with the right feature set (not much different from others) and the right community (a little less technical than others, perhaps, but not much) and the right backing from Canonical (though other Linux distros have their own sugar daddies).

All of those statements don’t really explain how Ubuntu came to dominate Linux mindshare. In fact, I don’t think there’s any real way to make a narrative out of it. The reality is probably more like the Linux community tinkered and hacked and scratched the itch and tried things until one of those things really worked. This is a signal, to me at least, that the Linux community is growing up: We now have, like any other domain, a winner-takes-almost-all distribution. For good or for bad, this is how these things seem to go.

I think sometimes that the world is like throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks. Of course there seems to be some correlation between hard work and success: Those people who work harder are likely to try more things. But you can work and work and work and work (look at Debian and Fedora and Gentoo and Linspire and a hundred others) and not have someone else steal and eat your cake.

You draw your own lesson. Does Ubuntu deserve to be where it is right now? Sure. Maybe if you’re working on another distro it seems a bit unfair. But even the words “deserve” and “fair” imply you believe there’s some kind of narrative going on. I disagree. There’s no narrative. There’s a metanarrative, and that’s what matters.

Not to say he wasn’t right about some things… but who isn’t right about some things? Buddha, for instance, was right about something things. As ad Hitlerum teaches, simply agreeing with something the Fuhrer said doesn’t automatically make you wrong.

Of course, I was a pretty bratty kid. I think I still am. I’m waiting for ten years down the road when I write a blog post (if we still have blogs) about how I would go back and knock the N.T. Wright out of my (younger) self.

Also, if I could go back in time, I’d not stop the piano lessons. And I’d buy a better guitar than I have now. And I’d wear more funky hats (can anyone find me a sombrero?) instead of trying to be cool.

Among other things.

The FCP is just dangerous. Mixing politics and religion is a recipe for the corruption of both.

But the Conservatives are much more benign, right? They’re like the Liberals, except just a bit more trustworthy and industry-friendly, right?

I don’t care anymore. When the current Conservative government introduces its copyright legislation, when I read that legislation and it appears carbon copied from the disastrous US DMCA and practically written by American corporate interests, they will have lost my vote. And I don’t mean in this election, I mean for as long as I feel they are corrupt and beholden to interests other than the interests of Canadians.

This is what bothers me. They are not serving voters. How will DMCA-like provisions in Canade aid people on the ground? Not at all. It will not provide them with jobs or health care or safety or any other measurable public good. It will simply make yet another class of thing against the law, and trust me, we already have enough ridiculous things that are against the law here. (For instace, smoking pot. There’s no way that should be illegal. Ill advised? Sure. Illegal? No.) There’s no public good here. There’s a supposed good for American content producers, of course, and for an American copyright regime spreading almost virally around the world.

We’re not even acting in our own national interests here. We’re acting in the interests of the USA. We’re the Eastern European nation that does whatever the might America says in the hope that one day we’ll be shown a photo of a pot of jam.

We’re helping to propagate the myth that the USA and its knowledge economy can dominate on the world stage as long as everyone everywhere obeys the same set of laws. And these laws are not, I might add, tilted in the favour of customers and citizens. The USA is using its international power to create and Information Technology Hegemony where it creates the content and the rest of the world has no choice but to consume said content.

It won’t work in the long term, of course. But in the meantime we’ll be saddling ourselves with a law whose intentions are not to help Canadians but instead to hinder them. Not to hinder them in order to help them, but to help media companies stick their hands further in citizens’ wallets.

I’m supposed to be Conservative, and for the most part I am still conservative. But this party and this government is slowly but surely starting to represent the interests of the industries and countries it has aligned itself with. They should be representing me and people like me who voted for them.

But they’re not. And if this policy comes to pass, I simply will not vote for them. It’s that simple.

But then there are people like me. I don’t have any coding skills at all. I don’t have enough time to pick them up. I really enjoy Ubuntu, I really like the concept of Open Source Software, and I want to help both of those things succeed. You tell me how I’m going to invest my time in a project like Inkscape. Or, even better, something simple like gTwitter, which could use some improvement. I’d love to figure out a way to help them along. I’d love pay a bounty in time to make a program I use all the time work like it should work, but I don’t have any usable skills that would help them along.

So paying your bounty in time is fine, as long as you have some sort of skill. But for the rest of us? The Joe Blows of the world who use open source software but don’t give much back? What about us?

There is nothing but a single desk lamp. Perfectly formed, lighting its patch of workspace exactly as it was designed to, functioning according to its schematic; it is the saddest lamp in the world. No drama lies hidden in its gunmetal and moulded plastic. It will function: Someone will turn it off and on and off and on again until the day it finally gives up the ghost. It will be replaced. Perhaps it will be replaced long before that day. Someone will decide it is too this or it is too that or it does not match this or that bit of décor and some landfill will inherit its husk. It will be casually tossed aside in any case. It was not made to be treasured.

It is brilliantly and beautifully lighting a typewriter whose letters now barely deign to show up on the paper it formerly so furiously devoured. They still make the oil that lubricates its well-worn machinery but no-one remembers how to make that crucial bit of ink. Soon it too will become an artefact, perhaps even a treasure. It will transition from usefulness to another more sublime existence: It will become something of a museum. You see this, this is how we used to write.

The pages beside it haven’t been touched in years. They pile up one after another after another and no-one dares move them. They grow from the floor and desk and chairs as if planted there and left in the dark like mushrooms to cover every surface. Dense with ideas and fragments of conversations, one might gather them into a book with too many themes and too many characters. One might read them quickly like scanning faces in a crowd. But they weren’t written to be read.

For instance. A city street. The sounds of night time and I am alone. It is better this way. I have crossed the tracks and seen your freight train barrelling past. I have continued. You have continued. There is nothing left to say.

These are the words of a thousand people and of one person. They are a wide brush to paint so many walls which one could name as Oh that was Opportunity, Oh that was Love, Oh that was Death, Oh we ran parallel for a while and then diverged. The hidden artist always has one face and one particular expression but of course you will take his painting and apply your own to it. You may read the pages and sense yourself in them when of course you are not.

He is in the bed across the hall under a different lamp that has been passed down through many generations. It requires a device of its own to connect it to the electrical grid. It requires and adapter, it is that old. He is lying there with his eyes closed but of course he is not asleep.

If he were to burn them the bonfire would go on for days. This is the constant question he asks himself: To light a match is so little effort: To destroy those measured hours would take a mere flick of the wrist.

Those uniformed men might dig through the ashes and gather phrases. They might say, Oh he was writing a novel, Oh one should not keep so much paper in one room, Oh perhaps this was once a typewriter.

If he were to burn them the bonfire would take everything with it. All his memories. They would scatter into the wind and the ground and the lungs of his neighbours. He would never be able to turn to a page and vaguely recall, Oh yes I was there, Oh yes I said that, Oh what was I thinking?

He is beginning to believe this is a good thing.

I have written the greatest post-rock ever!

Except it’s just me and my electric guitar and my foot pedal and my microphone and Ardour and Hydrogen and Jack on Ubuntu. But it works!