A book dare I write?

The idea of putting what I observe into a book seems to get more appealing every day. Thinking about the logistics, possible topics for inclusion, target audience, methods of exposure, etc, etc.

Last night I had a thought that might lead to both a title and a theme for the book. While reading about how the Meat Packer Assoc. of America dealt with the first public outcry's about Upton Sinclair's expose on the conditions of the meat industry, it occured to me that these big corporations behave like a master race or at least above humanity. They lie directly to your face without batting an eye lid and when that doesn't cool the heat, they obfuscate, deal false truths, undermine, etc with brazen impunity. Anyone who shows the gall to actually get them into a court room is drowned paper work till the prosecution can no longer function with the realms of the court system. Governments are either no good or actually side with the corporations since they see themselves beholden to these companies for their election campaign contributions, or won't do anything because it's "breach of free trade" or some other bollocks and inevitable concludes with caveat emptor or similar platitudes.

So, are we, the consumer, a slave race?

We dutifully do our duty of spending according to who generates the most eye-catching and overt advertising. Regardless of where we spend, the fact is that many of us feel compelled to spend, even to our own detriment. We place ourselves in debt to spend. Society, is built around that tenet that "thou must spend". Advertising campaigns are the commands sent down from on high and we listen carefully.

In the documentary "McLibel", a TV shot of George W Bush speaking about the effects of terrorism illustrated the stance of current policy makers nicely. George, in his transparently arrogant way, wasn't worried about how this would affect education or healthcare. No, with incredulity, he stated that terrorism wouldn't stop us from conducting business ... wouldn't stop us from shopping! There's a man who is genuinely concerned for humanity. Not.

A slave race? I think that maybe there's some truth to that.

Ongoing observations regarding "The Trained Consumer"

Yesterday, I convinced a work mate to rethink artificial sweeteners as a fat reduction strategy. On the face of it, that's a win. In fact, I was so successful, they threw a partially consumed can of soft drink away.

The information I used to perform this feat of magic was taken from the book, Why We Get Sick: The New Science Of Darwinian Medicine by Randolph M. Nesse & George C. Williams, which puts forward the following untested but provocative theory:

What if, when the body senses that it is about to ingest sugar (ie tastes something sweet), it reduces the rate at which it is converting the bodies energy stores to glucose, the expectation being that the ingested sugars will balance the shortfall. If the shortfall is not met, obviously the blood glucose level will drop which produces a hunger response, and perhaps, a craving for sweet foods. The outcome being that the benefits of low-calorie sweeteners is offset, and possibly reversed, by food cravings.

An offshoot of low cal response would of course be more products sales which is good for the corporate bottom line.

I'm sure there would be a fair amount of controversy generated by such a hypothesis if it were to come under public focus but still, I think it may have some merit.

Anyway, the point I'm making is that I felt uncomfortable with the fact that my colleague had taken what I'd said to heart without asking a single question. As I said to my girlfriend last night when I was relaying the story for her, my aim is not to preach to people to change them but to provoke them into finding answers for themselves.

By my own admission, I'm an idealist. I do however acknowledge that my approach to life is a luxury that many other people don't have. What works for me is definitely not for everyone. Which is why I feel uncomfortable when someone accepts my rantings without question. However, I find it very hard to stand by and watch someone I associate with abuse themselves in ignorance.

Sure I may be wrong but at least I don't have a vested interest. No doubt there's more to follow...

Religious faith as a means to keep the masses simple

I've just been reading a few of the entries on "The Celebrity Atheist List" and found Steve Wozniaks entry refering to an email that states that Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds and Larry Ellison are all atheists or agnostic. Steve admits to being "atheist or agnostic", also admitting that he doesn't know the difference.

It occured to me that believing that a god has a plan for you or is otherwise watching over you, or that life goes according to god's plan is a real nice, easy method of social suppression. How many people throughout history have chalked their losses, failures down to "god's will" and left it at that rather than trying again until achieving success?

I wonder how what the ratio is of atheism/agnosticism vs religious beliefs among successful people. And I'm talking about fair dinkum religion, not that bullshit American god of capitalism and ass kissing. Does that ratio match a corresponding enquiry among the general public? I would bet that there's an imbalance towards religion being rarer the higher up the ladder of success we go.

Blogging via email

Well, it's got to be about 6mths since I've posted here. Mainly because I
couldn't be assed going through all the crap of actually posting. However,
I just discovered or maybe re-remembered that a post can be submitted via
email. Post via email? Hell yes! I can even post from my mobile via email
for christ sakes!

So, now that I've finally joined the rest of blogging humanity in posting
via email, we'll see if I've got anything to actually say via email.

Or something like that...

I'm assuming I'll get better at this.

Farewell programmer, behold Software Architect

I spent a good part of today, not unlike most days, searching, writing, testing, backtracking and just generally feeling my way around the .NET framework (fx). There can be no doubt that it's an impressive piece of work and, it has to be said, I love it. But, the purist in me wonders what I'm losing (nay, throwing away) by being so lazy.

As part of my thinking process, I still refer to my days (well, yeah ok, nights) of building my C programs on the Amiga. The environment I had trained myself to use was strictly command line and self-rolled scripts. I thought it was pretty flash at the time. And yet the .NET Visual Studio environment is like the finest ice cream to a tea-spoon of sugar. But that ain't necessarily a good thing.

It took me a while to realise that learning a programming language isn't the hard part. It's learning the API or object model of the environment that takes the real work. I spent many hours trawling through the Amiga OS docs, marveling at all those functions and looking forward to the day when I'd have a project that would require me to learn how to use them. Going from VBA v5 (Excel/Access 97), which at the time I thought insurmountable, to VBA/VB v6 to .NET VB/C# has been a continuous seemingly vertical learning 'curve'. The funny thing is, I discovered today that it requires 2 lines of VB.NET code to open and post to a system wide Event Log of my own creation. A few days ago, I found out that it takes about the same amount of code to find out the name of the function that called the current function. These are not simple undertakings, at least I wouldn't have thought so. So what are we losing???

Back on the Amiga, I started out programming in AmigaBASIC. It didn't take me long to dump that and head for C, a much more satisfying and malleable tool. 68K assembly made a brief showing too, the two seeming to be very closely related and never far away from each other. Of course that could be because of Matt Dillon's excellent DICE compiler but I digress. I didn't move from BASIC because of speed issues, although that would have been a valid reason. I moved to get closer to the hardware and have more control over the actual code that was run. In fact, I usually took great panes to make sure things ran as efficiently as possible. It took me a long time to come across to the PC partly because of the bloat of the programs, which seemed to be simply reeking of inefficiency. On the Amiga, I could write a "hello world" program, in C, that compiled and linked to a 400 byte executable. The smallest program I could write on a PC was something like 16KB. Is it any wonder a 7Mhz Amiga felt like a 33Mhz 386?

Is David (a colleague) right to continue to write and debug his code in an environment that is little more than a fancy shell for a basic text editor? Is the frustration I feel when I see him racking his brains trying to hunt down a bug that simply would not happen in a more sophisticated environment, proportional to the level that I've been spoilt by the bells and whistles? Is he really disadvantaged by using an environment that does not dangle under his nose the spoils of the fx such as Remoting and Timespan types. I wonder. Unbeknownst to him, is he not 'paying his dues'?

In my defense, I think I've payed most of my dues and discovering all these new 'toys' in the fx and CLR has renewed my enthusiasm. These days, I feel more like a conductor than one of the instrumentalists as far as programming is concerned. In fact, I think the term programmer should be struck from current language, software developer being much better suited to the actual work. And besides, I can fire up WinUAE anytime and relive those days where you got two fifths of fuck all for free but the rewards were perhaps more valued.

Ta Da!

My first blog post.

This here this is supposed to help me organise my thoughts as well as keep track of the shit that flows through my head these days. Far too many interests for my own good.

Oh yeah, and we may as well jump on the bandwagon ay??