Whenever I go to vote, something inside of me is always different. The emphasis, or focus, is tilted toward something new each time. This time, unsurprisingly, it was Japan. I saw everyone around me who came to make their voices heard, however small, and I thought about the vote rate for Japan — something like 40-45% usually (it was higher last time, thanks to Obama, I suspect). I saw a mix of Swedes and foreigners around me all with their voting envelopes in their hands, and I felt a sort of wonder at how they cared when so many people who’d been born and raised here did not. Perhaps my time in Japan as a foreigner put more presumptions into my head than it discarded…

Whenever I go to vote — and I have, since I was allowed to, which puts me at #3 today — I go through this range of emotions which is different each time.

I feel intrigued, looking at those around me, wondering who’s with me and who’s against me, wondering what would happen if everyone suddenly started yelling out their choices.

I feel good, for actually giving a damn. Even if I don’t put a lot of faith into these politicians, I at least make a statement as to which one I think sucks the least.

I feel bad, for not knowing enough about the available parties. For not looking into, asking, scrutinizing agendas and watching debates they had going on TV*. I made my choice but it wasn’t a firm, absolute one, it was of the wavering kind. Perhaps it’s the times…

I feel guilty, because even though I do vote, I do so whilst in the aforementioned predicament, and I’m afraid that if those around me vote as “lightly” as myself, our democracy is pretty much a castle on a mountain of sand — a single tremor could send it sliding.

I feel moody, because of the times changing. My own views have changed radically, as have those of the world around me. The Social Democrats, my obvious candidate in the past, are struck from my list, possibly forever, at the very least until Thomas Bodström is removed. The Pirate Party is a joke, or I’d go “the responsibility-less route”**.

I feel uneasy. I mean, some fairly nutty parties have gotten a lot of support lately. I’d probably give up and move out of this country if SD got into the government***.

Regardless, I’ve at least performed my duty, if half-assed, as a believer in democracy.

—

(* from what it sounds though, the TV debates were fairly useless — a truckload of shitflinging, mostly)

(** they have “no views” on anything other than letting people download shit (and, they try to claim, “on privacy/integrity”).)

(*** SD = Sverigedemokraterna, a bunch of racist pigs who had something like 7% of people’s votes in a poll a couple of months ago. In Sweden, you need 4% or more to get into government, and in rare cases where the two major alliances (left and right) are very close, those 4% can give you a lot of control, because in essence, if left goes ‘yes’ and right goes ‘no’, you decide if the answer is yes or no (if you say yes, yes gets “48+4=52%”! If you say no, no gets “48+4=52%!”, presuming left and right had 48% each and you the remaining 4).)

“The first-ever Choose Privacy Week will take place May 2-8, 2010 and is a new program created by the American Library Association to help librarians organize events in their communities about the role that privacy plays in their lives, why privacy is important, and how their privacy can be compromised on a daily basis.”

The movie is a treasure trove in defining the modern privacy and integrity problems that have been escalating for the last few decades in a well-rounded sort of way. I can’t help but feel that there’s an important piece of the puzzle missing though, and it’s only touched upon briefly at the very end of the video: that privacy is a changing and evolving concept, and that privacy is different, depending on the context.

When I was studying Japanese, there was a rather interesting passage we read in school regarding privacy. In essence, privacy was not only an unheard of concept in Japan back in the day, but it was in fact detrimental to the health of society at the time. Not knowing where Tanaka-san the fisherman had gone off to last night could very well lead to his demise, because the members of his village didn’t go look for him in the woods (maybe he’d broken a leg due to a bad fall or something).

While Japan today might seem like a very private place, and while people are far less inclined to tell you what they feel or think, the Japanese do not hold privacy very high — at least not digital privacy, or rights online. Every single click you make is scanned and compared and analyzed. I know this first-hand, because I was the subject of several threatening letters related to copyright infringement, and the crime which I supposedly committed did not become a law until the year after I left Japan. Summarily, the ISP kept tabs, not to obey the law, but to appease whatever company paid them to keep tabs on their users — us.

Think about that for a second. They didn’t have to. But they did.

A friend of mine, when he signed up for an internet service with an ISP in Osaka, was asked whether he wanted the “service” of the ISP being able to at any given time look at his monitor and see what he was doing. All he had to do was install this piece of software.

He declined. The representative was flabbergasted. So was my friend’s girlfriend. In the end, the girlfriend had to tell the guy, “I’m sorry, he’s Swedish, they’re like this,” to which he apparently gave an uncertain nod and nixed it from the list of “services”.

Alongside this event, my teacher in school brings up the subject of privacy and of school records of children, that these records are sold to corporations and that said corporations use them to market their products (“Your daughter turns 20 this year, right?” – “Yes she does, actually, why?” – “Have you gotten a kimono arranged for her yet? If not, our company specializes in coming-of-age ceremony kimonos and would be honored to help you out.” I believe was the (fake) scenario depicted in the school text). My teacher pointed out the horrors of this unjust behavior, and all the while, her computer at home can at the flip of a switch be monitored by her ISP — judging from that rep’s reaction, not a lot of people decline that wonderful offer.

Privacy in a small village is not the same as privacy in a metropolitan city, nor does it work the same. Privacy in Japan is obviously not the same as privacy in Sweden. Privacy for a 15-year old isn’t the same as privacy for a 50-year old. It’s being redefined beneath our feet, and refined to fit niches and groups on a more precise and specific level.

In the Choose Privacy Week movie, a lot is being said about one’s actions online being permanent — no matter how many delete keys you press, once you’ve hit “send” on that email, or that forum post, or even blog post, you’re stuck with that information online, spreading completely outside of your control, which, unless you happen to be a marketing firm, can be a rather painful and destructive thing to have happen. Posting your age or phone number or interests on Facebook will inevitably mean that said information is processed and turned into a package deal that is sold to whoever pays enough.

“Why do free social networks tilt inevitably toward user exploitation? Because you’re not their customer, you’re their product.”
– Tim Spalding (via Cory Doctorow on Twitter).

At 360iDev as well as at the Voices That Matter iPhone conference, a recurring concept was that of “mining your users to better understand your own product”. The concept is as follows: track every keypress, track every page flip, track everything your user inputs into your application and feed it to your central server. Process that information, and figure out vital things such as which features users tend to use, and even more importantly, which features users tend to not use, in order for you to over time tailor your app to suit the needs of your users better and better.

My immediate reaction to this was “dear fuck, what about privacy?” and from what I can tell, Apple supposedly ensures that users do not mine sensitive data, and apparently also cracks down on misuse of said data. But Apple’s not exactly the ideal privacy protecting superhero, except in that they’d lose reputation (and cash) if it was leaked that their applications, well, leaked.

Regardless, it is an under-advertised “feature” that whatever app you install on your i* has the ability to feed a central server somewhere with information about everything you do in it. And it doesn’t have to tell you (as opposed to when it wants to track your current location). (As a sidenote, do you think Apple’s servers need to ask you for permission finding your iPhone? Not really, as any MobileMe account holder can (contentedly/relievedly) affirm, since it’s possible to locate your phone remotely online.)

The internet, and the world, has been steadily moving toward a new form of privacy. People like Cory Doctorow are (and rightly so) advocating more protection of user’s integrity, but the user him/herself keep taking steps further and further into, well, the light. We’re opening ourselves up more and more as we encloud ourselves and place more and more of us out there. Gmail online, not POP3. Google, which (in an open, we’re-harmless-we-promise sort of way) tracks your searches to tailor your results after your specific interests, blogs, where we exhale slowly, Twitter, where we do it quickly, IM’s, Facebook, where we tell everyone who’s listening exactly who we are and who we know… there’s not a lot that we’re not saying anymore.

In fact, I’d wager that the only things we’re not saying are the things we want to keep to ourselves. But we slip, we’re human. We blurt a little too much, in a blog, a forum, on IM’s, in an email, somewhere, and it’s stored and analyzed and categorized. And I’m not just being paranoid.

Sometimes we don’t even have to say anything at all. Guilt by association has been turned into an art form by the witch hunt for terrorists and/or evildoers of various kind. I have friends who are republicans and friends who are democrats, friends who are communists, or extreme-right wing nuts, gay friends, straight friends, old and young friends, I have friends who hate cops, Christian friends, atheist friends, muslim friends, and the list goes on — the very dirty-laundry sort of list. One might argue whether being friends with a right-wing nut is appropriate at all, but I can’t really choose my friends’ political views, and you’d be surprised at the level of intellectual capacity even certain right-wing nuts might have.

One of my more verbal friends had a blog once. He’d talk about everything and anything. One day, he applied for a job and got an interview. They were excited. He seemed like the man for the job. Then bam, they told him to continue searching. The reason? They’d Google’d his name and found his blog, and couldn’t have someone with his opinions in their work place. Trouble maker. His blog is no more.

Our privacy isn’t what it used to be. Jesse Schell talks a little about this in his DICE2010 talk labeled “Design Outside the Box“, a talk which I wholeheartedly recommend anyone remotely interested in game design, or the future for that matter. He describes “the future” as a place where every move we make is tracked and analyzed by machines, where our corn flakes box lets us play a game as we eat our corn flakes and see our points compared to our friends that week; he talks about how our future selves will read a book on our Kindle and get an achievement that we’ve read our thousandth book, and that we’d be embarrassed that our thousandth book was a stupid Star Trek novel. That we’d stop to think and realize that we didn’t know what our grandparents read, but our grandchildren will be able to see exactly everything we did and read and that maybe, we should try to be a little better and do better things with our lives… (except he says it much better — just watch it until the end, even though it’s close to 30 minutes long).

And maybe that’s precisely it. The inevitable truth is, we — the remnants of us that fear the loss of privacy and try to maintain it in some form, traditional or not — are fighting a losing battle, and sooner or later, everything we do will be registered and monitored and tracked and analyzed. I’m not even going to bother reassuring you that this isn’t paranoid thinking — if you think it is, seriously, you’ve gotta start reading the news, buddy. Or just reading, period.

But let’s look at it from a different perspective, by giving a small analogy. In a village with 100 villagers, privacy is non-existent. It is, because everyone knows everything about everyone. There is no privacy to be had in an environment like that. Old Joe Schmoe can’t get an erection anymore, and everyone knows, because that’s just how it is. Joe might feel infuriated and insulted about it, but at least the rest of the world doesn’t know about his predicament — small comfort to Joe, but relevant to our analogy.

In a big metropolitan city, Joe’s predicament is except in rare cases not known by anyone, or known only to those close to Joe himself. Him, his doctor, his significant other, and that’s probably it. Privacy is greater, because there are more people to blend into. We’re more anonymous.

Then we have the internet. The internet is the mutt, the screwed-up offspring of the village mentality of everybody knowing everything and the metropolitan anonymity of blending into the masses. It’s the ants on your TV when the crows ate your antenna. Black. White. White. Black. Black. Nothing is really gray here. More people know about more people. More people are famous for lesser reasons. Just take a moment and marvel at all the (ridiculous, one might accuse) “online celebrities” and what they’ve done to become so known to the world. That guy who cried about leaving Britney Spears alone? That kid with the laser sabre whom found himself the subject of countless “re-makes” where people did everything from turning his wooden stick into a real live zzzzzzmmm-yowling sabre to ridiculing him mercilessly. If I recall right, his parents tried to raise a fuss about it, but what’s there to do about it, anyway? It’s out there. No amount of hitting ‘delete’ is going to take it away.

Posterity online is a phenomenon all by itself. It’s like the subject of an immensely intricate equation, where week-old stuff vanishes without a trace and decades-old stuff remains. Those deemed famous by the online community will linger for who knows how long — maybe forever.

We fool ourselves, thinking that with the masses and masses of information online, we are the untraceable needle in the haystack, but the internet is evolving as rapidly as the content in which we aim to hide grows — if you’ve ever whined about a company on Twitter, you might have had the pleasant surprise of said company responding to your tweet. Just by writing the right keyword into your message, they get it fed to them via Twitter’s own search feature. Do you know how much information passes through Twitter in a day?

“By the end of 2007, about 500,000 tweets per quarter were posted. By the end of 2008, 100 million tweets per quarter were posted. By the end of 2009, 2 billion tweets per quarter were posted. In the first quarter of 2010, 4 billion tweets per quarter were posted.” (bolded by author)
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

4 billion tweets per quarter. Or roughly 50 million tweets a day. If every tweet averages at 100 letters, that’s 5 billion letters. Every day (this entire post counts 15k letters — the same amount is tweeted in one fourth of a second). If a company can find the mention of their name in 50 million tweets a day — 600 tweets a second — just like that, that probably means your “blending into the crowd” trick is flawed.

We aren’t used to this but the kids of our time are. How will they define privacy as adults, having been surrounded by the perpetual lure of providing more and more pieces of themselves to perfect the product that they are to Facebook or whatever may take its place in the future. They will inevitably see those around them lifted up into the light from the shadows of anonymity, to be ridiculed or praised or both, and then cast aside when they no longer provide entertainment for the masses. Their friends will be the rock stars and celebrities we could only see at a distance, stalked and exposed to anyone who cared. They will learn to deal with the public continuum that surrounds, even dictates, their lives. Privacy won’t be then what it is today, but the people of that time will know, on a near instinctual level, how to cope with and remain private. Privacy won’t be then what it is today, but perhaps we can guide the evolution of it onto a democratic path.

Meanwhile, before you go to that job interview — or go on that overseas trip, try Googling your full name or nick name, skim your blog for objectionable content, scan your Twitter feed, and come up with good responses for when they ask you about it. Presuming they even bother to ask.

This is an unexpected turn of events. Apple with its “closed” approach versus Adobe with ITS “closed” approach leading to more openness. Two wrongs do not make one right, you say, and I point at this wonderful, glorious exception of where just precisely that is happening. The very nature of “closed” means you can shut out whoever you want however you want, and Adobe in all of its proprietary glory shuts pretty much everyone except Windows users out (yea, Flash runs horrible on the Mac apparently, it’s a resource hog, and crashes constantly).

And Apple shuts Adobe out. Do you hear my giggles as I wheeze for breath?

It reminds me of MSIE back in the day. It was THE browser. The alternative was Netscape Navigator and it was a disastrous piece of crap where Internet Explorer was a shiny piece of solid gold. So developers ignored everything else. Even when Firefox came around, they continued doing so, at least the short bus folks did. Fuck web standards. Then suddenly, their “dis sait rekirs intrnet exprdorerlolstfu” sites were hurting, badly.

But it took a long while. Banks in Sweden required Internet Explorer up until a mere few years ago. My mother’s stock market site (uh yeah, my mom’s dealing in stock, but that’s another story) even to this day requires Internet Explorer.

Now we have Flash, and we see people doing the same mistake all over again. Especially with the web as it is today, with video content and all that, it’s no wonder people are going for Flash, because Flash is pretty much the only alternative. Well, sort of, anyway. Ah-yep-. If you clicked the link you probably noticed that it said “HTML5″ and if that didn’t mean much to you, let me rephrase:

No Flash.

Actually, I can rephrase that even nicer:

No Proprietary One-Company-To-Rule-Them-All Plugins Required.

Did I mention that HTML5 video is supported by the iPhone?

As a developer, this is the part where you go look at the figures for exactly how many people own an iPhone. And the part where you take a stand on whether the iPad will sell to millions or if it’ll flop over and keel. This is the part where you get the numbers fed to you: 42.5 million.

Forty two point five million iPhones as of Q1 2010. And your cute, bunny-hopping Flash-site? It’s a fucking piece of Lego right now, for those 42.5 million users when they browse on their phone.

Game software copy protection goes far back beyond that, of course, and in contrast, GCP (I invented this acronym, probably) can be justified a bit more. Music is something that we, on a nearly instinctual level, love to share with each other, be that by playing together or listening together or simply showing each other the kind of stuff that makes us feel certain ways. Music is such an integral part of the human society that’s been with us for as long as we’ve had hands to play with or mouths to sing with. The industrialization thereof is perhaps the most critical error of ours. Games on the other hand may have been with us for a long time (Go for example dates back to the 4th century BC), but it’s not as intimately associated with sharing as music. That said, game piracy of course thrives just as any other software piracy does, and the game developers seek new methods to battle the piracy.

Most recently, Ubisoft, the makers of titles such as Assassin’s Creed, have decided to take this a step further, thus evolving the DRM. Rock Paper Shotgun has an article on the subject of how Ubisoft not only restricts the player from starting the game without doing an online check to verify the game has not been pirated, but it even throws the player out of the game if their internet connection at any point in time drops offline, while playing.

I actually think that’s pretty awesome. I mean, the balls required to do that? Not to speak of, the conviction that their players will be loyal to the point of ridicule, that they buy the game anyway. Reminds me of Metallica.

Personally I’m the monkey brain blowing type, and I know how bad that sounds. I used MS-DOS and then migrated, unwillingly, to Windows, and from there I bounced back and forth between linux, which was a reeking pile of clusterfuck poured delicately over a yummy-looking pile of maggot-excrement and Windows. Still, linux did beat Windows even then, because Windows back then was about as useful as a web server made up of glued-together sheep wool and saw dust, with no ethernet port, and so finally linux is where I remained. Mac OS was like an unfathomable, lurking beast in the village marsh — I knew about it, I’d even seen it occasionally, touched it once or twice, but … as a kid I happened to like games, and Macs just didn’t have much of that back then.

This was back in the ’90s though. Ten years later, I find myself running Ubuntu 9.10, released about 4 months ago, and it feels like I installed Windows 3.1 all over again. The new pulseaudio service that is supposed to handle what ALSA cannot, is filled with wagons after wagons filled to the brim with stinking diarrhea, stretching to the horizon and beyond, steadily and irrevocably being injected into my blood stream. It – literally – fucks – with – everything – I – do. It fucks with mplayer, it fucks with Firefox, it fucks with World of Warcraft, it fucks with Skype, it fucks with Ventrilo. It literally clusterfucks itself into fuckblivion, and it just keeps on fucking itself like a horny teenager on prom night. Pardon the French. It has, for some ungodly reason, a new input method handler (for non-alphabetic languages, like Japanese), which resulted in me having to help my fiancée rip it out and put the old one back in because the new one — you guessed it — sucked balls and worked nothing like what a Japanese person would expect.*

And then on the far, far other corner of the spectrum I am simultaneously using my new MacBook Pro and iPhone, learning the ropes of Xcode and reading up on iPhone development in general. It’s cool. It’s closed. Oh, so closed. It puts me, the soulless donkey, between two stacks of hay into which the disastrous organizational abilities of Open Source has peed in the one, and the detrimental-to-evolution, devastating-to-our-rights Apple has peed in the other. Neither pile looks very convincing right about now, but hunger is the greatest spice of all, or so they say.

A fellow developer sent me a coupon to get his game on my iPhone to test it out right before it was going to be shipped, and then I got “this coupon can only be redeemed on the US iPhone Store”. That was the first cultural shock that lead down the path of cultural shocks. To develop for the iPhone I actually have to buy an Apple Developer account for (at the cheapest) $99 a year. It’s unthinkable for an old commie linux user like myself that I’d actually have to pay money to help them make their product better, by adding content to it, but it’s Apple, and they are in their own playing field.

Actually, I was convinced a long time ago that the whole closed off, shut off, hold my ears and screw my rights deal was a failure, as proven by Microsoft time and time again, but seeing Apple now, today, was as big an eye-opener as was the first time I ever visited the (North American) South — I’d been convinced from childhood that religion was being phased out in the world, in favor of reason…

Ultimately, I’m conflicted. As I grow more accustomed to the antics of my MacBook (and indeed, to a non-Mac user, there are quite a few, like the unwillingness to maximize, for one), I grow impatient with the bullshit of my main desktop (linux) machine, I grow annoyed with the feeling of being chastised and told where to stand and what to do by my Mac, and if there’s one thing I’ve become more aware of, it’s my rights as a user. The iPhone and the upcoming iPad are clearly changing how we think about computers in general, and while half the crowd aren’t half as impressed as Apple wishes they were, there’s such a huge potential in these two devices alone that nothing will be what it used to be by the time they’re old news.

So Apple is the pioneer, and we’re dragged along. I’m excited and, ultimately, conflicted.

(* I’ve seen this before. I’ve been using linux for over 10 years. I’ve seen the pattern. It’s time to stop this retarded behavior, folks. You can’t throw something random into the distribution, release it and “hope for the best”, and then have it actually working better than its counterpart three years later. It’s not acceptable anymore. We’re better than this. But I saw it with Firefox, replacing Mozilla. I saw it with ALSA, replacing OSS. (Fuck, ALSA replacing OSS is even today a big clusterfuck of clusterfucks where people sacrifice baby maggots daily just to get their set up of game + team speak app of choice in place.) And I see it again, with pulseaudio and ibus.)

I have never in my life seen so much hatred, and disdain, toward the United States as I’ve seen the last couple of years, from anyone of any nationality or age. Can that hatred be turned? I am hopeful, but the years to come will turn that hope into belief, or disappointment.

One might wonder why I even care about the election of a country of which I am not a citizen. I have friends there. It is a good reason. More importantly, though, I realize the impact the United States — especially when there is bad leadership involved — can have upon the world as a whole. Wars are waged, backed by invalid reasons, and the current economic crisis which affects the whole world is, at least in part, the result of such leadership.

Here’s to hoping.

“The characteristics of foreigner criminals visiting Japan.” (“来日外国人犯罪の特徴”)
A handbook “sponsored by the Shizuoka-Ken Head Police Station, the Shizuoka-Ken Association for the Prevention of Crime”

Link to Zone81 blog where this masterpiece is printed in its entirety (though without Japanese you won’t get much out of it — the pictures are fun to look at though).

I’ve been looking around a lot for some form of confirmation on this one, but my Japanese sort of fails me. What I did find was almost as bad though. Practically every prefecture in Japan has a [prefecturename].go.jp (government dot japan) page which lists “visiting foreigner criminals/crime in Japan”, divided into racial heritage with cute little diagrams and such.

Before I came to Japan, I knew it would be one of the few places on earth that I could go to and be “mistreated” for being a white male. Not a lot of places where you can get that these days. I knew, and I came here anyway, because I am fascinated by the Japanese language, the people who speak it, their culture, and how they came to be as isolated and “we vs them” as they appear from the outside (and from the inside as well, to a great extent). If I had wanted good treatment and smiley faces and chirpy birds, Japan would not have been on my list of places to go.

Some days pass and all I am greeted with is friendliness, openness, a willingness to accept each other as brothers across the world, and such floweriness. Today, as I came home from my test-ride to my potentially new school (was timing it to see when I had to get up in the morning) an old lady walked across the street as I was buying a coke from a … uh … jidouhanbaiki (the fuck is that in English?). I looked at her and she looked at me for a sec, and then she nodded and smiled and I nodded and smiled back. I realized that the Japanese are big on greetings. Even if you don’t know a person, you might nod to them if you end up inadvertently trampling into their bubble — such as looking at them while they happen to be looking at you. I tend to turn my head away and do my thing in those cases, but I think a Japanese might have nodded or something to acknowledge the other’s presence.

Then other days I am baffled by the blatant racism and ignorance that permeates this place. Such as the above “handbook”. I think part of the problem is that 20% of Japan’s population are all above 65 years of age. Old people tend to forget about equality and understanding cultural differences and such things. Sadly.

So she came over and, cunningly, she brought her knitting… stuff, with her. For various reasons, the rest of this post is in bullet form. Enjoy!

1. I plug my wireless thing, my monitor and my speakers into my lap top and boot up. The wireless keyboard does not work. I use the laptop keyboard “for now”.
2. I give up on the “for now” concept, pull the wireless thingie, plug in my wired keyboard and mouse. Nothing’s happening. It died? I end up doing the “hold-it-fer-five-secs-m8″ trick to force a reboot. My mother is getting the hint, and pulls out her knitting stuff and goes at it. I admire her foresightfulness.
3. Computer finally gets back up, but that reboot took 10 minutes, what the fuck? Anyway, the wired keyboard + mouse work now at least, imagine that. I log in and start up Firefox and head over to sf-anytime.com.
4. *meep* They require Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or above. I knew that’d happen. I happen to have IE 7 installed. I try to start it up…
5. And then I try to start it up again.. thinking maybe Windows didn’t actually realize that when I clicked on that icon I wanted it to start — if I click it again, maybe it will get the hint.
6. And then I try to start it up again, thinking that it might, just might, have missed the fact twice.
7. Reboot. Or, attempt to. Everything’s frozen. 5-second-killer-c-c-c-combo!
8. Back inside, I decide to do a Windows Update. Ha! Thought I! Windows Update uses IE which, currently, does not work very mightily.
9. I cunningly decide to open Firefox, head to sf-anytime.com, and tada! There’s the “if you want to upgrade to IE, click here” link. Yeah, I want to upgrade to IE. Upgrade. Yes. Let’s upgrade ourselves, because upgrading ourselves to IE is such an upgrade. Anyway, I download IE via the functional browser, Firefox, and start up the installer.
10. It wants to make sure I have a valid version of Windows, for my sake, so that I may buy a legal version in case I was handed a dirty one. So thoughtful of them! Now it wants to reboot.
11. Okay, we’ve rebooted. That took 10 minutes. I log back in and it wants to delete the old version of IE. Fair enough, I prefer a clean upgrade. Ha.. haha. It takes 10 minutes to remove the old version. (What on earth? I’m beginning to suspect the hardware is fried on this thing, except that it works perfectly fine in linux, and while, as we all know, linux is superior in every single way, shape and form, it does not have the ability to magically use broken hardware.) It wants to reboot. Wow, this reminds me of when I was a little ignorant and exceptionally dumb boy who used Windows .. what was it? 95? I think so. Anyway, I quickly grew up. Moving along.
12. We’ve rebooted again. It wants to install IE now. Yay! Finally we’re agreeing about something. Well, sort of anyway. It seems stuck.
13. We’re waiting for it to unstick itself. I am beginning to recall my Windows l33t-ness which is a Zen-monk’s patience incarnate. Yes sir. Meanwhile, I’m explaining to my mother whose wide-eyed, incredulous stare has been glued to the monitor (all the while knitting away on whatever it is she’s knitting) for all this time that in Windows, it controls you, and you obey it. (She’s been using linux since she started using computers some 3-4 years ago. Exclusively. Windows scares her shitless, and believe me, it scares me shitless too.)
14. I decide to make some coffee while we wait. Suddenly my mother yells excitedly, “It’s finished! I think.” I look at it and, believe it or not, but the little shit rebooted! It didn’t even ask! What the hell? I log back in, and it starts doing some weird “Setting IE up, customizing your computer, optimizing the hyper drive”, whatever. I ignore it and drink my coffee. Afterwards, I am faced with a dialog telling me it wants to upgrade Windows. No, it needs to do so. Okay then, I let it.
15. 30 minutes later it’s done. We sat down to watch the movie at ~8 pm and it is now 10.30 pm. Will we finally get to see that movie? That remains to be seen.
16. I load up IE (it works this time) and head over to sf-anytime.com. Or I try. It seems Internet is down. Huh. I open up Firefox and go to google. It works in a flash. Hm. I close IE, reopen it, do not hit ESC to stop it from loading “blabla.msn.com” this time. Wait it out. It loads up fine. Try sf-anytime.com again, and this time it works. The wonders of Microsoft.
17. After installing a DRM thing (a little piece of my soul died when I clicked ‘install’), we finally got in, to see exciting titles such as …
18. … movies that were hip 20 years ago. That, and a few obscure titles from 2004. Is this a joke? The selection is pretty large, I give you that, but there’s literally nothing on there worth watching. My mother finally points out a movie (Zozo by Josef Fares) that she said I’d like, so we watch that one (super-condensed review: started out great, ended suckily). Or we try! Ha. Ha. Ha.
19. Or as Santa would put it – ho. Ho. Ho.
20. We are told that some DRM error occured. For some magical reason (I think it’s my ancient Windows intuition pinging me from someplace), I decide to upgrade Windows Media Player. I do so. I try again.
21. It works.
22. Except it’s now 11 pm.

I occasionally reflect upon my hatred towards Microsoft Windows. I mean, people do use it, and there has to be a reason. Sometimes, a friend of mine decides to switch over to linux, saying they’ve “had enough!”, and I help them out. But inevitably, they will come to a point where they think “Dude, this is just too much work. I’m thinking of installing Windows again,” and I always tell them the same thing: “Yeah, do so. You should use what feels best for you.” One thing is abundantly clear, however, and that is that I personally cannot use Windows. It’s following a philosophy that I can understand, but never agree with. The philosophy of “handling stuff for me”. This philosophy works great for an absolute beginner, but not so great for a person with a tiny bit of adventurism in them. Try to “play around” with Windows and you will kill Windows. And I’m completely ignoring things such as virii and worms and trojan horses and whatever have you. The way I see it, those will come to linux as well, when linux has a big enough player base. What I do believe though, is that it will take an idiot to get a virii in linux, and it will be more about fooling people than it will be about brute-forcing one’s way into another person’s operating system, as is the case with Windows.

Security holes exist in both places, and I remember one time when some Windows advocate said in response to an article, “Where are the linux people now?” Well, my answer to that question is, “We’re somewhere else, not giving a shit,” because the blown-up “security holes” mentioned in that article were for specific pieces of software. It’s a much bigger deal when a security hole applies to every single computer running a particular operating system (i.e. a kernel flaw), and you will find very few of those in linux. Unpatched, that is.

In any case, there you have it, my Windows experience for the year. And believe me, I am not looking forward to a second one. Those movie tickets I got (I have like 6 of them) will remain unused. If you find something at sf-anytime.com that you’d like to see, let me know, and I’ll get you a code, but you better hurry — they expire on new years, GMT+1.

“Q: Is it legal to say the word ‘foo’ while chopping another human being to little pieces with an axe?”

“A: No, it absolutely isn’t!”

I mean… I can say that anything and everything is illegal if I word it right and quote the wording just so.